What they were actually reporting was the smell of the airlocks after they returned from their excursions. The moon has no atmosphere, so it has been accumulating dust from billions of years of asteroid impacts that have never come in contact with oxygen. Many of the chemicals in the dust are oxidative and so when it is exposed to air for the first time it rapidly oxidizes just like gunpowder!

And I think the outer space report was from space walks, and the explanation was that the first time the airlock itself was exposed to hard vacuum, the surfaces of the airlock would have a reaction that left a scent of ozone.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materials_International_Space_...

Long exposure, 68 months, right. But it was only supposed to be in orbit for 11! Challenger being destroyed on reentry made a mess of things.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Duration_Exposure_Facilit...

>It was placed in low Earth orbit by Space Shuttle Challenger in April 1984. [...] At LDEF's launch, retrieval was scheduled for March 19, 1985, eleven months after deployment.[4] Schedules slipped, postponing the retrieval mission first to 1986, then indefinitely due to the Challenger disaster. After 5.7 years its orbit had decayed to about 175 nautical miles (324 km) and it was likely to burn up on reentry in a little over a month.[6][9]: 15

Those are similar but sweeter. If I sterilize a room with UV it has a very distinct smell like nothing else aside from lightening and stun guns. I would UV the bathroom right now but then I have to vent the entire house and its 34F outside right now.

Diatomic oxygen is already a highly reactive fuel that is killing us and giving us cancer every single day. The ozone species is even more oxidative.

Oxygen is how we move about the energy gradient, but it's also killing us. Ozone is worse.

"Air purifiers" with ionization are probably not worth the squeeze.

I'm not normally one to miss the sarcastic or satirical posts, but this one seems oddly earnest.

I think they're referring to oxidative stress [1] caused by cellular respiration.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxidative_stress

They have a remote control that "arms" them and it starts beeping slow, the faster, then much faster then activates. It kills insects be destroying their lungs and entirely destroys mold, bacteria and even damages viral material. Hospitals run the same lamps in wings that they close down for sanitation. The entire area has to be 100% vented.

[1] - https://www.amazon.com/AeraLight-Whole-Surface-UV-Sanitizer/...

The IDLH (Immediately Dangerous to Life and Health) level for ozone is five ppm.

That's half of chlorine which is 10 ppm.

Most major brand air purifiers put out a very minimal amount; the ionization is beneficial because it makes the really tiny (and thus most hazardous) particles clump and fall/stick to surfaces faster.

It's the offbrand units that generate lots of ozone to make people think they're "doing something", and commercial ozone generators for car/room deodorizing, that you have to be extremely careful with. Those need to be set up and then the room left for hours for the ozone to react with stuff, and then ventilated thoroughly.

Humans are built to withstand a constant assault on their immune systems. We couldn't have survived if we didn't.

Its a bit naieve to claim that cleaning one's home will result in an extinction of enough microbes so as to be threatening to our immune system.

Presumably, moonwalks would also have some ozone like the space walk did. But, maybe the burning-moon-dust gunpowder smell was a lot stronger than the vacuumed-metal/paint ozone smell.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perchlorate#On_Mars

But having solid ground is still nice.

A workable compromise is making big habitats in a dome, that gives sunlight, but shields from radiation. And the ground needs to be processed obviously.

The advantage of Venus to me is is gravity.

At the right altitude where you can "float" on the ocean, it's a pretty comfortable temperature and there's plenty of solar energy but you're shielded from the solar radiation. So, long term, your body will still work, assuming you can solve "the other problems."

Of course, the down-side is that there's nothing to stand on and probably more importantly, there aren't many useful materials to work with besides tons of carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen. Not much hydrogen there, so not much water, which probably is the biggest problem. One of them, anyhow. Also, there's probably not a whole lot to do besides float (zoom, actually) around and slowly go stir crazy in your bubble.

But relatively speaking, it's way nicer than living in a hole on mars where you'll slowly die from gravity sickness, or radiation poisoning, or whatever.

Actually, the cloud layer at that level is mostly sulfuric acid, from which you can get your water. It also means you need to be in a hazmat suit when you walk outside, but that's still a step up from everywhere else, where you need a bulky pressure suit instead.

Whether it is really possible, is a different question, but after you have an atmosphere, you could have engineered microorganism processing the soil etc.

(Turns out there's a region in Antarctic with them too, so we can always test things there.)

Of course you’ll probably have lots of side-effects.

NASA has proposed using "synthetic biology to take advantage of and improve upon natural perchlorate reducing bacteria. These terrestrial microbes are not directly suitable for off-world use, but their key genes pcrAB and cld...catalyze the reduction of perchlorates to chloride and oxygen" [1].

[1] https://www.nasa.gov/general/detoxifying-mars/

2) If you have a source of hydrogen: water. Bonus as you don't have to make the dome hold pressure. A layer of water of the right depth will generate the force needed, the structure only needs to keep itself level. The only pressure holding is outside that, enough to keep the water from boiling. And, well, it's water--if it's hit by a rock that isn't too big you'll just have hole in the top layer, easily fixed. The same general idea would work on the Moon but the water is far from transparent if you pile up enough of it and you need a lot of hydrogen.

Well, I guess that's what regolith means.

Still, I'm pretty sure we have plenty of people who wouldn't mind giving it a try.

It’s really only a concern if you ingest it.

Could the suit itself be used as a type of airlock, to leave outside things outside?

For example, mounting yourself onto a wall, then the back/whatever of the suit opens to the inside, and you hop out? (yes, there would be some dust recovery required, but minimal in comparison)

Someone else linked to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Exploration_Vehicle#Spec...

edit: in that context^ search for "SEV suitport design" find NASA has written some docs on the matter, eg https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20130013652/downloads/20...

Isn't there a plan for the Artemis lunar rover to be configured this way? The outside of the suit never comes inside the rover.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5FqozA4IpA

There has been some great research into laser or solar sintering of regolith, and one of my first questions was if the resulting material is safe for humans.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-42008-1

An interactive microscope of regolith.[2] Like tiny broken glass, hard as rock, and sticking to everything like static-charged packing peanuts.

An old tech memo and paper.[3][4]

[1] https://an.rsl.wustl.edu/apollo/data/A17/resources/a17-techd... page "27-28" 258, 50 in pdf. Lots of other mentions of dust. [2] interactive microscope of regolith https://virtualmicroscope.org/sites/default/files/html5Asset... [3] The Effects of Lunar Dust on EVA Systems During the Apollo Missions https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20050160460/downloads/20... [4] IMPACT OF DUST ON LUNAR EXPLORATION https://adsabs.harvard.edu/pdf/2007ESASP.643..239S

> Fine like powder, but sharp like glass

Sounds scary. But totally worth it!

> Although it is clear that the health risks from asbestos exposure increase with heavier exposure and longer exposure time, investigators have found asbestos-related diseases in individuals with only brief exposures. Generally, those who develop asbestos-related diseases show no signs of illness for a long time after exposure. It can take from 10 to 40 years or more for symptoms of an asbestos-related condition to appear. [1]

[1] https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/s...

It's the same with F1. "We have the best drivers in the world!" You have the best drivers from the self-selection mechanism you impose on the sport. There are zero reasons to think these categories have good overlap.

Moon dust is still problematic since although smaller it also can't be digested by macrophages and it's believed it would accumulate in the lungs, building up on repeated exposure.

[1] https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/nasas-dust-shield-success...

It will irritate human mucus membranes whenever it comes in contact. Irritate lungs, eyes, skin.

It degrades rubber seals.

It's by the cartoonist of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal and his wife (the one with an actual science PhD). https://www.smbc-comics.com/

I had the opposite reaction. I thought it set forward a realistic set of challenges we have to solve and experiments we have to do before building anything more than a research outpost on Mars. That, in turn, makes a permanent Moon base more valuable.

Standout problems were low- and zero-g trauma medicine, plumbing (something Artemis II started working on) and mammalian reproduction.

I've had the thought for some time now that the most viable path to settlement in space -- if humans actually decide they want to do it -- is to settle space. Not the Moon, or Mars, or Venus, or anything else, but space itself.

In space you can build big rings and spin them for 1g gravity. Your environment is hermetically sealed and you control what comes in and out. The solar system is full of asteroids that appear, from what we've seen, to be incredibly rich in raw materials, and these bodies have such low gravity that you could literally pull up next to them and go dig stuff out of them. This makes things easier, not harder. No dangerous landings, no huge blastoffs. Even the Moon at 1/6 gravity is much harder to get stuff off of.

Free living space habitats could move around. There could be moving towns and cities, more or less, that could tour the solar system and pick up resources and rendezvous with each other. Think steampunk style traction cities in space, kind of.

Politically you leave behind at least some of terrestrial politics. I'm not naive enough to think people would never find anything to fight about. We're good at coming up with stuff to fight about. But the notion of battling over land pretty much goes away. Space is called space for a reason. Resources seem very abundant. I don't see a ton of resource competition unless we discover some resources that genuinely are rare and available in only a few places.

In the very long term, this path leads to the evolution of an actual spacefaring civilization rather than simply a repeat of terrestrial politics on another planet.

But there's also an argument that there's no point in trying until we at least have a couple of key technologies: fusion, very good automated manufacturing, and very good robotics. Fusion is key for enabling scalable power and mobility. Automated manufacturing and very good robotics are probably key to self-sufficiency.

Trying to do the "real space age" before the key technologies exist might be akin to, say, trying to start the EV revolution with lead-acid batteries or the PC revolution with vacuum tubes. While it's technically possible to try, it's just not going to "take."

Says you ...