From: Eugene Leitl (eugene.leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de)
Date: Sat Aug 26 2000 - 02:29:16 MDT
J. R. Molloy writes:
> Submarine crews don't have much privacy, and they seem to get along all right.
Cabine fever is a reality, and submarine crews only do manage to
function for a limited time, under military law. I'm sure if
occasionally things run less well than expected, it is not exactly
makes the news. Resident former army/navy people care to comment?
> That they are men-only probably doesn't explain *all* their success in this
> regard.
I've heard the Russians have been routinely screening the crew for
mutual compatibility for their long-term orbital missions (but they
still do rotate the rest of the crew). Also, astronauts are typically
kept occupied virtually 100% of the time -- not only because people
LEO time is expensive.
As to privacy, we automatically assume small, cramped quarters when we
talk about space. A near-closure lunar habitat must maintain a certain
ecology footprint for each team member if it to be sustainable, and
lunar material is cheap, as is oxygen produced from lunar rock. While
I'm not sure whether pressurizing (so far hypothetical) sublunar lava
tubes makes all that much sense, one could certainly imagine burying
an airlock-connected gridwork of metal cylinders in lunar rock (both
against radiation as a means to contain leaks) as habitat volume,
being constantly expanded.
Personally, I find recent news about development of a small lunar
rover melting regolith with a portable solar oven and sputtering
photovoltaics cells upon resulting glass sheets heartening. This is
still very far from being self-rep, but at least people are not blind
to local resources, anymore. A lunar factory can churn out a lot of
cubic meters of habitat before even first crew will move in.
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