Towards the ultimate self sustainable society ― manufacture system design for in-situ resource utilisation in a 'moon colony'

摘要

We will discuss a radically new approach to production planning. Building on the success of supply chain management practices and life cycle analysis, we propose to perform an overall optimisation of production requirements. In particular, we will study the manufacturing needs for survival, omitting "luxury" production such as home electronics and entertainment. The approach will reduce the vulnerability of the society, thus greatly reducing the potential impact of natural disasters or terrorist actions. As an example, we use known data on available resources on the moon, mapping these against a first level breakdown of human survival requirements. The resulting process flowchart is presented, featuring essential processes such as life support, mining/processing, manufacture and power/transport. A conclusion is that manufacturing capacity needed for sustained human life on the moon can be built on mainly quite standard technology. Further, the experiences gained from a full-scale "survival production" exercise will not only give valuable insights in the needs for large scale human space exploration, but will also be highly applicable in many terrestrial applications, including supply chain optimisation and disaster relief.