Thoughts on the Coral Mission - Craig Beasley

[founder-outbound]

This issue is in response to #41

I have been involved with Lunar exploration/exploitation discussions since the mid-1990's, primarily through the auspices of the Artemis Society, and its sister entity, the Moon Society. Of high interest to the Moon Society team has always been the development of some suitable means of ISRU construction for habitations and workspaces. With Coral, I see a very familiar desire. I also see more viability to the Coral plan than I had seen with the Moon Society efforts, chiefly in the ability to fund and construct a working system.

As an engineer, design and systems, I am especially encouraged by the concrete steps being taken via Github management of tasks and genuine level of expertise in working on such a system. We're going to have some fun getting the team fully organized and moving, but I see that we'll be able to reliably manage the effort with the tools available.

Coral should be a relatively straight-forward integration task as we define the needed requirements and assay the available hardware items. The only caveat that I have to offer is that we need to arrive a basic architecture for the system as soon as possible, and then stick to it as closely as we can. Mission creep is a killer on any big design like this, and even more so with distributed teams.

[Suzibianco]

Great thoughts!

[timallard]

Reacting to Craig's post and phase one is a landing pad, my view changed to two machines, self-powered, one makes composte adobe pavers, the other fire bricks as thev clear a landing site and pave it, no gantry, as a first milestone.

This focuses scope to a finished, durable pad, the pavers build roads to ore bodies later using rail molds an option. Second phase has a good foundation, the soils are a resource, these machine sort & leave bags to collect for processing integrating functions the overall push.

Two specfic replicable machines clear & produce a durable landing pad as step one of phase one.

Next was the Polynesian ability to arrive with all needs added into "Is this too hard & effort too big should we send one instead" triage as it's not really an experiment, this is humanity's first try at Biosphere IV, on the moon.