Cozy little cottage for the moon
By Gary Haber
The (Wilmington, Del.) News Journal
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FREDERICA, Del. — It looks like half of a big, blue ski parka. It's really an inflatable building able to withstand winds up to 100 mph and temperatures as low as 58 degrees below zero.
The demonstration project, built by the company that has made the space suits worn by NASA astronauts since the 1960s, could be the model for a structure NASA wants to install on the moon to house astronauts.
Over the next year, NASA and the National Science Foundation will test the structure at the McMurdo Station research complex in Antarctica to see how it handles one of Earth's most unforgiving environments. Monitors and cameras in the structure will record everything from interior temperatures and possible leaks to the structure's ability to inflate itself when pressure drops.
The 16-foot-by-24-foot structure — about the size of a one-car garage — is one of a number of concepts NASA is considering for a lunar building to shelter astronauts for as long as six months.
"It's a field demonstration of a potential technology we might utilize for an inflatable lunar habitat," said Larry Toups, habitat element leader in the lunar surface projects office at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston.
To make the project happen, ILC Dover had to meet some rigid timelines.
The Frederica-based company had less than a year to design, build and ship the structure to California. From there, it was shipped to New Zealand and then airlifted to Antarctica.
ILC Dover engineers began working on the project in April, started construction in August and finished it in November. The structure was installed in Antarctica in January.
NSF and NASA want a structure that is lightweight, so it could be easily transported to Antarctica, or the moon, said Patrick Haggerty, program manager for arctic research support at NSF. The dome-like design that ILC Dover came up with weighs about 900 pounds.
It has three layers:
The arched-roof building, 8 feet tall at its highest point, is surprisingly comfy, Scheir said.
Scheir, along with Dave Cadogen, ILC Dover's director of research and technology, and four NASA engineers camped there overnight in their sleeping bags, curled up on the cushioned and insulated floor. Heaters kept the interior at 65 degrees.
"You didn't feel like you were camping," Scheir said. "You felt like you were in a room."
Even though the structure is lightweight, it is durable, strengthened by inflatable tubes that help stiffen the walls.
"If you ran into it with your full body weight, you'd bounce off it without leaving a mark," Scheir said.
ILC Dover has long experience working in the space program. A display in the lobby of the company's headquarters holds the spacesuit astronaut John Young wore on the Apollo 10 mission in 1969, the predecessor to Neil Armstrong's moonwalk during the Apollo 11 mission.
