Get/Keep Air on the Moon!

We like the moon. It's close, you can see your home from there, low gravity well, so you get easy mass drivers to orbit for fleshing out your spacer economy, plus you can do fun things in pools.

It's great.

The only slight inconvenience is the fact that the moon is an airless, radiation-bathed hellhole with burning days and nitrogen-freezing nights.

Now, assume we can develop the technology (and the financial and political will to marshal the resources) to get an 4000m Earth-like air pressure (about 60 kPa) at Moon surface. I know that with the lower gravity, the moon's atmosphere would tend to disperse to a great distance, and that gases would be lost in relatively quick order.

To prevent that, I'm thinking of building a (set of) domes that would cover the entire surface of the moon, with laser point defense stations to blast away micrometeors and repairbots to fix any tears that might occur anyway.

My question is, what makes more sense from a realist perspective - going for domes to cover the entire surface or allowing for the air to spread out the vast distances, and constantly replenish whatever is escaping?

PS: Keep in mind that I'm not suggesting this as a first approach to the moon. We may well start out like rats in deep tunnels, and have robots prowling the outside for a bit. But eventually, I want my swimming pool to overlook the Earth.

EDIT: Note that a question about placing an envelope around a tiny asteroid already exists, but that question deals with essentially a tiny object (a few km across) with near-zero gravitational acceleration, so that yields completely different restrictions and results.

posted about 9 years ago

Serban Tanasa‭

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