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Many plans for how people can populate and cultivate the earth. moon have been presented in recent years.
One NASA employee even went so far as to claim that humans will be living on the moon by the end of this decade.
Given that not a single building has been constructed, no electricity has been provided for residents, and no easy way to travel there and back has been found, there is still a lot of work to be done before this actually happens.
However, a private research company has already received funding from the US government to build “street lights” on the moon, so that’s beneficial for us, and that’s a beautiful thing.
This is important because each night on the Moon is equivalent to two weeks on Earth. While that’s great for hanging out in the world’s first space hotel and bar (scheduled to open in 2027), it’s bad for seeing lunar residents return home after a long night.
The company Honeybee Robotics (part of Blue Origin), which will install these lights on the moon, already has a plan for this called “Lunar Utility Navigation with Advanced Remote Sensing and Autonomous Beaming for Energy Redistribution”, or LUNARSABER for short.
Honeybee Robotics is one of 14 companies selected by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to build a lunar economy in 2023.
The “street lamps” that Honeybee Robotics plans to build on the moon will be 100 meters high. They will store solar energy during the lunar days and use it to illuminate the lunar nights.
Accordingly Live science, The reason these light towers will be so tall is so that light can be cast over the rims of huge craters and nearly a ton of scientific equipment, such as cameras and communications equipment, can be lifted to higher vantage points.
Of course, building such colossal structures on the moon comes with challenges. To overcome these, Honeybee engineers have developed an automated system that allows each LUNARSABER tower to effectively protrude from its own base by bending rolled-up metal ribbons into towering cylindrical tubes. This means that a spacecraft only needs to worry about delivering the device’s base to the moon, while the actual tower sits rolled up inside.
The problem of undersupplied electricity could also be solved with such light poles by networking several of them to form a kind of power grid.
