REVEALED: How Nasa plan to send robots to Moon to build colony humans may one day live in
By Jon Austin
OUR moon has huge cavernous craters which open onto the surface, but sunlight never reaches the bottom, making them very dark and extremely cold. But Nasa thinks one day human colonies could be set up inside them.
Human colonisation of the Moon, after robots have hopefully made it hospitable, is one of a series of wildly ambitious preliminary proposals the space agency is being funded to explore further.
The Moon proposal would involve a test run at the Shackleton Crater, twice the size of Washington DC, on the Lunar South Pole.
This means sending a rover droid vehicle to set up solar reflectors, which would reflect sunlight so it went inside the crater and caverns below.
The crater would be filled with solar-powered transformers which could then be used to power equipment and make it hospitable to humans.
Robots would have to be programmed to build a mini Earth oasis on the Moon before anyone could live there.