Name: Two New Ways We Could Live on the Moon!
Uploaded: 2020-04-04T09:10:04.000Z
Duration: 5 min 28 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

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SciShow Space is supported by Brilliant.org.

Last week, scientists and engineers announced two new developments in possible lunar habitats.

So if you've ever hoped to live on a barren, cold wasteland with minimal atmosphere, this

Space News is going to be very exciting for you.

First, Bigelow Aerospace and United Launch Alliance, or ULA, announced that they'll

be sending one of Bigelow's inflatable habitats, called the B330, to low-lunar orbit as early as 2022.

The habitat would act like a lunar depot, where astronauts could live and train, and

where other companies could test their space tech.

If this sounds kind of familiar, it's because Bigelow has been working on inflatable space

We covered their BEAM habitat last year when it was sent to the International Space Station for testing.

BEAM is a lot like a pillowy space closet, with 16 cubic meters of volume when it's fully inflated.

Right now, it's attached to the ISS with all kinds of monitors in it to measure things

like micrometeorite impacts and cosmic rays.

It's still intact and safe for humans to live in, and it's being used as storage.

The plan is to keep it attached to the ISS for at least a couple more years to see how

The B330 habitat is basically a super-BEAM.

When expanded, it has a volume of 330 cubic meters, over 20 times more volume than BEAM,

But of course we'll need to get it off Earth first, which is where ULA comes in with their Vulcan rocket.

Vulcan is a big rocket redesign for ULA, with new, super powerful boosters and a second

stage called the Advanced Cryogenic Evolved Stage, or ACES.

It's also the only commercial rocket in development big enough to launch the B330.

Vulcan won't be able to launch before 2019 at the earliest, and ACES won't be ready until 2023.

And ACES is essential for getting the B330 to the moon.

First, the inflatable habitat will spend up to a year in low-Earth orbit for tests.

Then, if everything works out, it will dock with ACES, which will push it on over to the moon!

But it will still be a while until ACES is ready.

Now, if you'd rather live in the moon instead of near it, you may be more interested in

Lava tubes are … well, tubes made by lava.

Scientists aren't always that creative with names.

There are a couple ways they can form, but one way is when underground lava cools and

Then, the lava inside drains out and leaves behind a tube.

We've suspected there are lava tubes on the moon for a while, because we know it had

lots of volcanic activity early in its history -- but now we're pretty confident they're

Back in 2009, researchers found an unexplained hole in the Marius Hills, a region of the

moon covered in volcanic rock and peaks from hardened lava.

And in 2014, more research confirmed that the so-called Marius Hills Hole was an opening

into some kind of long cavern -- so, possibly a lava tube!

But we still didn't know how far underground or how tall it was.

Then, last week, a team from JAXA, the Japanese space agency, confirmed it: The Marius Hills

They used data from radio sounding -- basically, radar -- to find that the tube, or tubes,

start about 75 meters underground, and are around 75 meters tall.

Now, a big hole on the moon may not sound that exciting, but it would actually make

It protects us from high energy radiation, keeps us all warm and cozy at night, and burns

The moon, on the other hand, has a really thin atmosphere that's not very useful.

So, even with spacesuits on, astronauts would be exposed to potentially dangerous cosmic rays.

And a long-term habitat on the moon's surface would be vulnerable to meteorites and freezing temperatures.

We could overcome all those engineering challenges, but an underground moon base would solve those

Rock, especially dense rock like volcanic basalt, is really good at filtering out cosmic rays.

It also traps heat in and, if it's thick enough, provides shielding against meteorites.

So scientists looking at moon colonization are big fans of lava tubes as potential real estate.

And now, thanks to this new research, we know there's at least one tube big enough for

We'd just need to figure out what sort of housing to put inside them.

But, like some scientists have pointed out, an inflatable habitat in a lava tube might

So someday, maybe Bigelow Aerospace will also start an underground moon base.

And then we'd all be living in a James Bond movie!

Lava tubes are pretty sweet on their own, but the technology scientists use to find

them can be used for other tunnels as well.

You can learn more about similar tubes here on earth with Brilliant's Oil Prospecting

quiz, which takes you through how gravitational anomalies are used to locate oil deposits

So since we're going to take a quiz, let's go to the SciShow Quiz Show set to check it out.

So I don't actually know anything about oil prospecting, so I'm going to kinda back

up in the lesson so I can learn more before diving into this part of the quiz.

So this oil prospecting lesson's really cool because it's not anything I ever would

They're using calculations that we use to talk about planets to talk about the stuff

So based on what I read before in the lead up to this part of the question I think the

So you'll always learn a lot with Briliant.org but it is definitely not over your head.

There's always lots of information that you can unpack to help you figure out the quizzes.

I think it is really fun to get sucked into the world they create with each lesson and

So if you want to check it out and help SciShow Space you can go to Brilliant.org/scishowspace

and the first 200 people that check it out will get 20% off of their annual subscription.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

Two New Ways We Could Live on the Moon!

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