The evolution of lunar habitat concepts

Abstract

A tremendous effort has been expended to understand the lunar environment for scientific purposes as well as for the eventual drive to settle and create an extension of human civilization on the Moon and then Mars. We summarize these environmental challenges and identify two designs that are representative of current thinking for first- and second-generation lunar habitats. Interestingly, the basic habitat structural options have not fundamentally changed over the last half century, even though technical advances have occurred as has our understanding of the lunar environment. As such, the potential quality of the conceived habitats has improved without much change in their appearances. This paper is only meant to provide an overview of the subject and is not representative of the literature, which numbers in the tens of thousands of documents. The citations herein are a door to a subset of those vast references.