Purdue University’s “RETH (Resilient ExtraTerrestrial Habitats) Institute is working with NASA to put lunar habitat concepts through testing on earth to see how well they would survive hazards such as getting radiation-bombed, blasted by meteoroids or shaken by a moonquake, reports SyFyWire. Some of the tests happen completely onscreen. Other tests incorporate realistic quarter-scale habitats.

These trials can do things that would be physically impossible on the Moon, says Shirley Dyke, head of the program. You can change the circumstances in a cyber physical test faster than you ever would be able to in real life. If you’re testing out a habitat in a lunar lava tube, you can change the location to the Moon’s surface without physically rebuilding the entire thing.

Dyke is looking for habitat characteristics such as resilience, intelligence and autonomy. She says that smart habitats need to maintain and repair themselves — and when to send for emergency-response robots. “Eventually,” she said, “we want to develop smart habitats that can respond to changes, damage and anything that could go wrong during a mission and still maintain the integrity and safety of the science inside.”

The United States could lead the return of humans to the surface of the Moon by 2022 for an estimated total cost of $10 billion, concludes NASA’s Alexandra Hall and NextGen Space’s Charles Miller in a paper written for New Space Journal, “A Summary of the Economic Assessment and Systems Analysis of an Evolvable Lunar Architecture that Leverages Commercial Space Capabilities and Public-Private Partnerships.”

The big takeaway, NASA astrobiologist Chris McKay told Popular Science, “is that new technologies, some of which have nothing to do with space — like self-driving cars and waste-recycling toilets — are going to be incredibly useful in space, and are driving down the cost of a moon base to the point where it might be easy to do.”

According to the study’s introduction, the exercise explored a scenario in which the strategic objective was commercial mining of a propellant from lunar poles that would will be transported to lunar orbit to support a human expedition to Mars. Key assumptions include:

• U.S. leadership an international partnership of countries to leverage private industry capabilities within the framework of an International Lunar Authority.
• 100% private ownership of the lunar infrastructure and assets. The partnership would not own the land itself, but would own what was removed from the land.
• An “evolvable lunar architecture” for the habitat.

more “$10 Billion to Put a Colony on the Moon”

Landing humans back on the Moon could cost only $10 billion, one-tenth the cost of previous estimates of $100 billion, according to a study released by the National Space Society and the Space Frontier Foundation, two nonprofits that advocate building human settlements  beyond earth.

“A factor of ten reduction in cost changes everything,” said Mark Hopkins, executive committee chair of the National Space Society, in a press release.

The 2014 Human Spaceflight Report cites two source of cost reductions: the forging of private and international partnerships, and the ability to mine fuel on the Moon. The report envisions setting up a lunar industrial base that mines water from the lunar regolith, reports Popular Mechanics, and then sends the hydrogen into orbit around the Moon where Mars-bounds spacecraft can refuel. The industrial base would house four astronauts. Within 12 years, it would provide 200 megatons of propellant at a cost of $40 billion.