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If we establish a
base on the Moon, how will the astronauts who live and
work there survive? When Neil Armstrong was there in
1969, he said, "It has a stark beauty all its own.
It's much like the high desert of the United
States." But he didn’t spend months at a time
there.
The moon affected the
astronauts who went there in different ways. Buzz Aldrin
later fought off alcoholism. Edgar Mitchell became a
paranormal investigator. James Irwin became a born-again
Christian, searching Mount Ararat for Noah's Ark.
 Living
on the moon means increased exposure to cosmic rays from
the sun, since the Moon does not have a magnetic shield
around it like the Earth does. Apollo astronauts even
saw colorful flashes they called "ghosts,"
caused by charged particles from the Sun passing through
their optic nerves. The unprecedented solar flares of
recent months would have driven them underground.
It's not a place for
fussy housekeepers. "One of the most restricting
facets of lunar exploration is the dust and its
adherence to everything, no matter what kind of
material," says Apollo 17 astronaut Eugene Cernan.
"Simple things like the bag locks and the lock
which held the pallet on the Rover began not only to
malfunction but not to function at all." Astronaut
Harrison Schmidt ruined the visor on his spacesuit while
trying to clean the dust off it and he also turned out
to be allergic to Moon dust.
 The
lower field of gravity cause human bones and muscles to
atrophy, but it's not as bad as the zero gravity on the
International Space Station. It’s also extremely cold
up there, so robots may do a lot of the outside work.
The months of isolation would be hard, like spending
time in a submarine or Antarctic base. The difference
is, you'd see "home" every time you looked up
in the sky.
But building materials
won't be a problem, since NASA researchers have turned
simulated Moon material into concrete and glass. And
astronauts won't run short of air to breathe, since Moon
dust is 40% oxygen—which works fine, as long as you're
not allergic to it.
 One
of the Moon astronauts' biggest enemies will be the sun.
Paul LaViolette explores Ancient myth and esoteric lore
from around the world tell frightening tales of
humanity's suffering through destructions by fire and
flood, legends of catastrophe so extreme and so
pervasive that now we tend to discount them as
imaginative exaggerations, and links them all to the
Sun.
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