AIAA San Francisco Section Newsletter
June 1995

Life on Luna
Mountains, Molehills and Hothouse Emotions

by
Brenda Forman

	Back in the summer of 1988, I was teaching Space Policy 
& Law at International Space University's first summer 
session.  It was a ferociously hot summer in Cambridge, 
Massachusetts, and ISU had brought together 103 young hyper-
achievers from a couple of dozen countries to learn 
everything about space that ISU's impressive faculty could 
think of to teach them.  The students then had to apply both 
this knowledge and their own formidable prior expertise to a 
group project to design a permanently manned, international 
colony on the moon.

	This was a lot more than your traditional engineering 
design project.  In addition to engineers, the ISU student 
body included lawyers, medical doctors, space architects, 
policy experts, financiers, research scientists and 
entrepreneurs.  Cross-cutting these professional outlooks 
were the cultural outlooks and orientations of some twenty-
odd nationalities.  All of these had somehow to be 
incorporated into the project's design.

	As the summer progressed, the whole situation began to 
strike me as a lot more than just a theoretical design 
project.  Instead, I began looking at it as a serviceable 
analog of the psychological dynamics of a future lunar base.

	The unrelenting demands of the ISU curriculum resembled 
the remorseless scheduling of astronauts' time.  The cultural 
isolation of students sometimes half a world away from home 
did serviceable duty for the impact of a quarter-million-mile 
separation from the home planet.  The ISU student body could 
readily be regarded as a reasonable facsimile of the crew of 
any future lunar colony.  Like the vanguard of any 
undertaking so ambitious, complex and demanding, they were 
fiercely intelligent, formidably educated and deeply 
competitive.  The ensuing rivalries and l0ve affairs provided 
and interesting window on what life on Luna might actually be 
like for those who first opened the next frontier.

	As this exciting, hugely stressful session wore on, I 
was struck by the manner in which its participants' 
psychological universe narrowed steadily to sometimes laser 
intensity.  Few found time or attention to explore the 
remarkable city in which they found themselves.  ISU became 
their world, much as the airless isolation beyond a lunar 
base's borders would focus it inhabitants' psychological 
engergies intensely inward.

	As the weeks went by, the hothouse intensity of the 
process produced a growing psychological edginess.  Advocates 
of rival design concepts circulated midnight petitions in 
support of their favored approaches.  Personal antagonisms 
flared and perfervid love affairs flourished.  I found it 
revealing that both antagonisms and romances mostly melted as 
the students emerged, exhilarated and exhausted, from the ISU 
airlock.  But I often found myself wondering what the results 
might have been of these intellectual, emotional and sexual 
tensions had their physical confines truly been as small as 
the lunar base they were designing and had their confinement 
in it been closer to perhaps nine months than to the ISU 
session's nine weeks.

	One of the questions I raised to my Policy & Law 
students along the way grew out of those ruminations.  What 
do you do with a lunar base crew member whose tensions 
explode into some act of violence?  You can hardly expect to 
confine him/her -- every inch of the base has cost millions 
to build and there is none to spare for unproductive 
confinement.  Nor can you spare his/her skills from the 
base's functioning -- every member of the colony's early crew 
will have been chosen for expertise in multiple crucial 
fields.  Subtracting those from the team's resources could 
cripple the base's functioning.  And yet, can you allow 
him/her to remain free?  One episode of violence could 
presage others -- and even if it does not, how do the rest of 
the crew cope with their fear that it might?

	None of my students had any answers for this question.  
Indeed, the most eloquent aspect of their response was that 
they determinedly dodged the question.  Which didn't 
particularly surprise me; designing high-tech hardware, after 
all, is so much easier than figuring out a workable design 
for peaceful human coexistence.

	Of course, we will eventually colonize the moon -- 
although I don't expect to live to see it.  And we will 
encounter and deal with all the tensions, stresses and 
psychological detonations that have typified every frontier 
in history.  But oh, what steamy novels, psychological 
thrillers and frontier-style confrontations will result.  
Hollywood should start optioning the rights now.