Four Chinese university students have been locked in two bunkers in a Beijing suburb, where they’ll attempt to spend the next 200 days living self-sufficiently. The isolation experiment, called Lunar Palace 365, is designed to study the desolate living conditions in space and on another planet.
While in the Lunar Palace 1 bunkers the students will be restricted to self-sustainability, using just what they brought in while recycling everything from human waste to plant clippings.
This marks the second stage of a three-part, yearlong experiment. During the first stage, four different students spent 60 days within the Lunar Palace 1. These first four students will return for 105 days after the second stage is complete.
The students represent Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics and told Reuters they’re enthusiastic to participate as aspiring astronauts.
“I’ll get so much out of this,” doctoral student Liu Guanghui said. “It’s truly a different life experience.”
China has been been ramping up its race to space, jostling to be a leader in exploration, with its near-term plans to send a probe to the far side of the moon in 2018 and launch the core module of its independent space station the following year. China also wants to send astronauts to the moon by 2036, leveraging what they’ve learned from Lunar Palace 365 to facilitate longer stays.
Though the students are expected to remain self-sufficient, scientists from the university say they’ve made precise measurements to ensure the participants had what they’d need before entering the bunker.
“We’ve designed it so the oxygen (produced by plants at the station) is exactly enough to satisfy the humans, the animals, and the organisms that break down the waste materials,” said Liu Hong, a professor at Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
China is by no means the first nation to undertake such space-oriented isolation experiments. Russia holds the record for the longest with participants having lasted 520 days.
NASA’s ongoing HI-SEAS experiments puts participants into a 13,570-cubic-foot dome on top of a Hawaiian mountain to simulate what it might be like to live on Mars. The participants are only allowed to leave the dome wearing a “space suit.” One HI-SEAS team ended the longest NASA-sponsored mission of the sort last August when the team emerged from the dome after a year. Another team entered for an eight-month experiment in January.
After 13 suborbital test flights and more than $15 billion in development costs, SpaceX's Starship has finally reached orbit. The 407-foot megarocket, the most powerful ever built, lifted off from Starbase, Texas, on Monday and delivered its first real payload on it's 14th attempt. The celebration came with an asterisk, though, since SpaceX had to cut the planned 10-hour mission to roughly three hours.
https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/2104601695711904180
SpaceX is finally ready to give Starship its biggest test yet. The company says the massive rocket's 14th test flight is scheduled for September 22, when it will attempt to put the upper stage into Earth orbit for the first time. The launch is currently pending regulatory approval, with a 75-minute window opening at 7:15 a.m. CT.
Starship has 26 Starlink satellites to deliver
For decades, humanity has looked up at the Moon and wondered what it would be like to live on it. Think sprawling cities, factories, research centers, and permanent human settlements. Unfortunately, there is one fairly fundamental problem with that vision.
A new study published in Frontiers in Space Technologies argues that even the Moon's potentially enormous reserves of frozen water may be nowhere near enough to support city-sized populations sustainably. Researchers Martin Elvis and Jonathan McDowell estimate that the permanently shadowed regions near the lunar poles could contain roughly one billion tons of water. It sounds like an extraordinary amount until you put a million thirsty humans next to it.