Frequently Asked Questions
Our FAQ section is divided into two parts:
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General FAQ
Here are answers to frequently asked questions sent to the support department.
If you have a question you would like addressed, please send an email to Customer Support and we will respond as quickly as is practical.
- Q. If a window breaks on L5 does it let out air and oxygen?
- A. Yes, a window breaking on the outside of the structure would cause an air leak - and the glass panels used to let sunlight into the colony's interior are going to be pretty big. Knocking one out completely would be a major problem that required immediate attention, but with multiple layers and specially engineered glass that doesn't shatter when damaged, four alarm window losses won't be very common. Even if one was - or even a few of them were - lost, it would still take a while for the air pressure to drop significantly across the whole colony because there's going to be *that much* air inside the colony. If you look at the timeline published here, you'll see filling the air supply starts two full years before the condos are expected to be ready for first occupancy.
- Q. Why are you building an environment for humans at L5, requiring oxygen, food, plumbing and toilets, waste disposal and so forth. As I see it, the fantastic speed in which AI and robotics are progressing, your project could be mostly robotic?
- A. The point of humans going to travel, explore and develop in space is so humans will be there. I don't want to send a robot out there to look around and send me pretty pictures, I want to go there and see for myself - and when I see a curious rock on the ground, I want to be able to pick it up, turn it over and see what the other side looks like.
- Q. As you have to get the materials from the Moon, why not build condos on the Moon first?
- A. For us, the moon is only a stepping stone. One advantage of building colonies at L5 is it's a lot easier to get a 1G environment people are used to than it would be on the Lunar surface: With a colony shaped like a bicycle tire with a radius of 900 meters rotating once a minute, the "gravity" would be just about the same as here on Earth. Building a system on the Moon to achieve the same result would be a MASSIVE project, if it could be done at all.
In addition, building massive structures, such as solar power plants that are 11 miles across, and shipping them to geostationary orbit is *VERY* much easier than trying to launch them from the Moon. (It's worth noting that those solar power plants are what's going to pay for the whole thing.)
- Q. I had a geology friend from WPI who went on an Apollo mission, growing crystals in space. They got hit by a chard of paint that shattered a portal it caused a huge problem. You can expect a lot of collisions so you will have to have a large inventory of glass.
- A. Glass is one of the things that will be easy to manufacture from the Lunar soil, and is easy to recycle from broken pieces. So yes, there's going to be a large inventory on hand. As noted in another question, the glass will be engineered to be more resilient, and with a much larger volume of air to absorb small leaks, any damage that *does* result in air leaking to space will be a *lot* less of a problem than it was for the Apollo missions.
- Q. What about human waste? Do you just shoot it into space? It can be processed to a degree (Formosa oil) but not reusable! So do you jettison it?
- A. The colonies at L5 are going to be ecologically self sufficient, recycling waste for agricultural and industrial purposes, growing their own food with the farm pods being a major component of the air processing system.
All of the human space missions to date, and that will be conducted for a few more years, has dealt with "waste" merely by dumping it overboard, much like throwing trash out the window of a moving car. Not only does this make a mess of the environment - and pose a hazard to other spacecraft - but it makes those missions totally dependent on a continuous resupply chain to continue their operation.
Successful self-sustaining off-world colonies, whether at L5, on Mars, or anywhere else in the Universe, will not have the "luxury" of being able to dump their trash anywhere it happens to land: In order to survive over the long term, recycling *everything* is going to be a necessity.
- Q. Everything you need would have to originate from earth and take some time time to reach L5. So a machine failure on L5 could be fatal unless a couple spares are already in L5.
- A. Some things, such as computer chips that require elements not yet found in the Lunar soil, will need to be resupplied from Earth (at least initially), so yes, having an inventory of spares is an important part of the plan. Systems and technology for doing that are already in use many places here on Earth already, so fitting the required logistics into the rest of the project isn't going to require much additional effort.
Over time, as the off-world industrial base grows, the number of things that can only be obtained on Earth will dwindle, with the ultimate goal of reaching zero. Once *that* milestone is achieved, Humanity will truly be a multi-homed species, greatly enhancing our chance of survival well into the future in spite of any natural or artificial disasters that could end our history now.
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Site and Technical FAQ
Here are answers to frequently asked technical and site-related questions sent to the support department or the Webmaster.
If you have a question you would like addressed, please send an email to our Webmaster and we will respond as quickly as is practical.
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