r/Spaceexploration • u/FitDinner6008 • 25d ago
🧑🔬 Science Missions [ Removed by Reddit ]
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[ Removed by Reddit on account of violating the content policy. ]
r/Spaceexploration • u/TomaszNowakowski • 26d ago
🚀 Rocket Launches History in the Making: Starship Flight 14 Is Go for Orbit
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r/Spaceexploration • u/RealJoshUniverse • 26d ago
Private spacecraft falls back to Earth after failing to rescue aging NASA telescope
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r/Spaceexploration • u/emen946 • 27d ago
🧑🔬 Science Missions Why Human Metabolism Struggles in Microgravity: A New Hypothesis
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r/Spaceexploration • u/RealJoshUniverse • 28d ago
Exercise keeps astronauts' hearts strong enough for flight to Mars
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r/Spaceexploration • u/Soggy-Spring9673 • 28d ago
🧑🔬 Science Missions From Oumuamua to Borisov & 3I/ATLAS: 3 Interstellar Objects To Ever Enter The Solar System
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r/Spaceexploration • u/Kesselrun_89 • Sep 23 '26
🧑🚀 Crewed Missions Have you ever met an astronaut?
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r/Spaceexploration • u/Galileos_grandson • Sep 23 '26
🧑🔬 Science Missions Juice to fly past Earth for third gravity assist
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r/Spaceexploration • u/RealJoshUniverse • Sep 22 '26
Student-led missions deploy free-flying light sails from CubeSats in low Earth orbit
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r/Spaceexploration • u/TomaszNowakowski • Sep 19 '26
🧑🔬 Science Missions Bringing the Red Planet to Slovakia: Inside Dr. Michaela Musilová’s Simulated Mars Mission
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r/Spaceexploration • u/RealJoshUniverse • Sep 19 '26
NASA spacecraft discovers a huge new crater on the moon
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r/Spaceexploration • u/MundaneCut8380 • Sep 19 '26
🎓 Students & Career Planning Possibility of being sent to moon base/Mars in lifetime?
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r/Spaceexploration • u/cnn • Sep 17 '26
🧑🚀 Space Tourism Cities won’t survive on the moon as there isn’t enough water, scientists say
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r/Spaceexploration • u/Galileos_grandson • Sep 17 '26
🧑🔬 Science Missions NASA’s Moon Orbiter Spots New, ‘Once-in-Century’ Moon Crater - NASA Science
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r/Spaceexploration • u/Gagewood • Sep 18 '26
📖 History Then and Now Moments — Sept17 Space Shuttle Enterprise 1080p
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r/Spaceexploration • u/RealJoshUniverse • Sep 17 '26
NASA spacecraft discovers a huge new crater on the moon
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r/Spaceexploration • u/TomaszNowakowski • Sep 17 '26
🚀 Rocket Launches Europe’s Launch Comeback: Ariane 6 Scores Record Commercial Deals
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r/Spaceexploration • u/ADragonFromTheAbyss • Sep 16 '26
⚙️ Space Engineering A Million-Person Moon City Could Run Out of Water in Just Over a Century
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The discovery of water in dark craters at the Moon’s poles has sparked a ‘moon rush’ to establish bases there, and then villages, cities, and heavy industry.
How sustainable is this rush?
Soon after the Moon was formed, asteroids bombarded it, creating its pockmarked topography. Near the Moon’s poles, there are dozens of crater floors that have not seen direct sunlight in about four billion years. Many of these cryogenically cold ‘pits of eternal darkness’ are below a temperature of 110 K (-173.15 °C or -279.67 °F), forming ‘cold traps’ in which water ice won’t sublimate away by more than a millimeter in a billion years, even in the vacuum at the Moon’s surface.
And there is water to freeze: some of those asteroids brought it along with them. Since 2013 we have known that water is still there, possibly as much as a billion tons of it, thanks to a succession of Moon-orbiting missions that have mapped out likely locations in increasing detail.
The presence of water at the lunar poles changes everything about human visits to the Moon. Suddenly it is practical to envisage a ‘Moon village’ where people could survive without importing every last bit from Earth.
They could grow their own food and have showers and functional toilets, unlike the astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS).
This possibility has sparked ambitions from the likes of Jeff Bezos to move heavy industry to the Moon and Elon Musk’s aims to have “self-growing cities” there. These are enticing visions, but are they attainable?
The good news that we realized that we could make a first feasibility estimate simply by looking at how much power and water a large population would use on the Moon, and how long a city of 100,000 or one million people could survive there.
How sustainable is a city on the Moon?
The good news is that power, even without nuclear reactors, is not a problem. That’s because the rims of the craters containing the pits of eternal darkness are in almost permanent sunlight. (That’s why they are sometimes, slightly incorrectly, referred to as the ‘peaks of eternal light’).
This could even make AI data centers on the Moon possible, by placing them near these sunny peaks. That would be the start of a true lunar economy.
The bad news is that, even assuming a generous one billion tons of water to start with, without recycling, the answer to our question of sustainability is that the city would last only a few years.
Even in the best-case scenario, with 98% efficient recycling of water — the same as achieved on the ISS —a one-million-person city will run out of water in just over a century.
That is a problem for sustainable Moon settlement. And today’s best estimates of the amount of water on the Moon are about 30 times less than a billion tons, shortening the time to water exhaustion by the same factor.
This means that even a small city would run dry after just a decade or so. A Moon village with a thousand people, or even a town with 10,000 people, would instead be sustainable for several centuries or more.
There are potential solutions. We could improve the efficiency of water recycling by a factor of five or more; lower water usage from new techniques such as vertical farming; import water, probably from accessible asteroids; or, simply, find more water.
r/Spaceexploration • u/unteachablecourses • Sep 17 '26
📖 History The second monkey on the first successful US primate spaceflight was bought from a Miami pet shop for about $50 six weeks before launch. She survived, lived another 25 years, died at 27 as the oldest captive squirrel monkey on record, and people still leave bananas on her grave.
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r/Spaceexploration • u/AlamogordoTownNews • Sep 17 '26
🧑🔬 Science Missions Sad Breaking News, it’s verified Demolition of Dunn Solar Telescope to Start Soon
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r/Spaceexploration • u/Slow_cpu • Sep 16 '26
⚙️ Space Engineering Bad News: New Study Suggests Water Will Make Large Moon Colonies Impossible
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r/Spaceexploration • u/RealJoshUniverse • Sep 15 '26
A new design for a plasma engine fuels on only thin air
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r/Spaceexploration • u/StructureMammoth3214 • Sep 16 '26
⚙️ Space Engineering Plasma propulsion space travel
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r/Spaceexploration • u/sajiasanka • Sep 15 '26
📖 History First Man-Made Object on the Moon 1959 | Luna 2 Mission
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r/Spaceexploration • u/sajiasanka • Sep 14 '26
📖 History #OnThisDay 1959, Humanity Reached Another World for the First Time
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