Direct Curing of Polymer Construction Material in Simulated Earth’s Moon Surface Environment

摘要

The Earth’s industrial exploitation of the moon requires a hermetically sealed structure large enough for allnservices: the life-support systems, energy-producing units, the storage of air and water, a greenhouse, and so on. Thenbest way to achieve this is a light inflatable structure, which is transported to the moon in a packed position. Thenconstruction material has to be soft at deployment and made rigid at exploitation. One way of making the deployednstructure rigid is a chemical reaction that forms a hard frame for the construction.However, a previous project basednon an external hermetically sealed pocket experienced problems as a result of high pressure due to evaporation of thenlow-molecular-weight mass fractions of the uncured matrix and the resultant uncontrolled deployment of theninflatable structure. A structure is proposed in which the frame wall is external to the wall of the structure, whichnwould eliminate the problem of uncontrolled inflation but requires that the structure be cured in a free-spacenenvironment.