Avoid peeling out with rhino snot
I ran across an interesting article this morning that was both interesting and made me smile. As theoretical plans for building permanent Moon bases continues an issue I had not thought of before has arisen. Peeling out and wheelies come to mind as it is described. Apparently the Moon is covered in regolith. I wasn’t sure what regolith was so I looked it up, it is loose rock, gravel and in the Moon’s case lots and lots of dust.
The small craft that have landed and later relaunched from the Moon dealt with this without a problem because they were light weight and didn’t create a massive disturbance. But it could present a problem for the larger craft that are envisioned for future Moon landings tied to permanent bases.
So how do you clear that away to get to bedrock? or do you? One approach involves robots building a landing pad made of….. regolith. At the bottom of the article I share is an interesting demonstration video that shows how it would be done. I found it interesting and hope you do as well.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/build-landing-launch-pads-moon-100041474.html