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There was some concern when Apollo 11 landed that when they repressurized the LEM with moon dust samples inside it would start a fire. I think they had a small test article that they blew a small stream of oxygen over to ensure it wouldn't auto-ignite.

At least some ISS astronauts describe smelling burnt metal after returning from EVA, if memory serves. (Others may smell ozone, I've just always remembered hearing burnt metal).

My UV sterilizing lights make my room smell like O3 Ozone and that smells nothing like spent gun-powder to me. The only other time I have smelled the same thing is when there has been mass lightening events in the sky. Were they talking about actual black powder or nitrocellulose? I've smelled black powder at the range when people bring out their antique rifles and that also does not smell like Ozone to me.

Yeah, the ground on mars is literally toxic. Makes the concept of a Martian colony less appealing. Almost equal to a floating station on Venus. At least there you’d have the correct pressure. I seem to recall that the temperature on Venus at an altitude of one atmospheric pressure is manageable. It’s just also acidic. Possibility easier to deal with than perchlorates.

Calcium perchlorate is only slightly toxic. Not good for you, but living in an environment with background radiation levels 50x higher than on Earth may be your bigger worry...

Still, I'm pretty sure we have plenty of people who wouldn't mind giving it a try.

Personally, I suspect all anoxic environments will turn out to be unhealthy for humans. You'll have a bunch of reactive stuff about that on Earth would have been neutralized long ago.

> That will require that humans never come in contact with the regolith or things that touched it.

It’s really only a concern if you ingest it.

If this fact piques your interest, the book Delta-v by Daniel Suarez glances off this fact and uses it to justify exploring asteroid mining instead of a colony on Mars.

Or effective decontamination performed in the airlock. There was a recent demonstration of an electrostatic repulsion device reducing dust on suit fabric which might help with sticking. And an air shower like used for clean rooms does not seem too far out.

there's a great PBS Space Time for that (of course)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5FqozA4IpA

TIL

Even with actual asbestos, the risk goes up a lot with duration and intensity of exposure. Probably, the risks of getting cancer from a brief exposure is fairly low, and combined with the ridiculously small sample size of only 12 people to ever set foot on the moon, it's natural that none of them got "moon cancer". That said, with asbesto, it's still possible to get cancer even from brief exposures:

> Although it is clear that the health risks from asbestos exposure increase with heavier exposure and longer exposure time, investigators have found asbestos-related diseases in individuals with only brief exposures. Generally, those who develop asbestos-related diseases show no signs of illness for a long time after exposure. It can take from 10 to 40 years or more for symptoms of an asbestos-related condition to appear. [1]

[1] https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/s...

Only 4 are still alive, all in their 90s so that’d be a long time - even if some do have cancer at this stage it’s not likely to affect life expectancy I guess.

Part of what makes asbestos (and also fiberglass) dangerous, isn't just the sharpness but also the long shape which means that macrophages can't engulf them.

Moon dust is still problematic since although smaller it also can't be digested by macrophages and it's believed it would accumulate in the lungs, building up on repeated exposure.

Exactly, but the lack of a water cycle on the moon means that all the dust is sharp and always will be.

It will irritate human mucus membranes whenever it comes in contact. Irritate lungs, eyes, skin.

It degrades rubber seals.

I walked up to the flows on Fagradalsfjall when it was erupting a couple of years ago, and I found the cinereous, sulfurous air to be very medicinal and clearing. I'm not sure it'd have good for me for more than a few hours, but as it was, it was great. I occasionally wish I were able to just have a chamber with that air in it.

> If you want to get depressed about all the problems with trying to colonize Mars

I had the opposite reaction. I thought it set forward a realistic set of challenges we have to solve and experiments we have to do before building anything more than a research outpost on Mars. That, in turn, makes a permanent Moon base more valuable.

Standout problems were low- and zero-g trauma medicine, plumbing (something Artemis II started working on) and mammalian reproduction.

This is on my reading list. I've read synopses of it, and I don't think it's going to change my mind a lot. I'm still long-term pro-space-exploration, but even before this book I'd come to the conclusion that this is a lot harder than naive nerds tend to think. I think it's worth doing and probably will be done eventually, but it's gonna take a while.

I've had the thought for some time now that the most viable path to settlement in space -- if humans actually decide they want to do it -- is to settle space. Not the Moon, or Mars, or Venus, or anything else, but space itself.

In space you can build big rings and spin them for 1g gravity. Your environment is hermetically sealed and you control what comes in and out. The solar system is full of asteroids that appear, from what we've seen, to be incredibly rich in raw materials, and these bodies have such low gravity that you could literally pull up next to them and go dig stuff out of them. This makes things easier, not harder. No dangerous landings, no huge blastoffs. Even the Moon at 1/6 gravity is much harder to get stuff off of.

Free living space habitats could move around. There could be moving towns and cities, more or less, that could tour the solar system and pick up resources and rendezvous with each other. Think steampunk style traction cities in space, kind of.

Politically you leave behind at least some of terrestrial politics. I'm not naive enough to think people would never find anything to fight about. We're good at coming up with stuff to fight about. But the notion of battling over land pretty much goes away. Space is called space for a reason. Culture wars become less relevant if everyone's town is mobile and if you don't like your neighbors you just move your whole "pod" around. Resources seem very abundant. I don't see a ton of resource competition unless we discover some resources that genuinely are rare and available in only a few places.

In the very long term, this path leads to the evolution of an actual spacefaring civilization rather than simply a repeat of terrestrial politics on another planet.

But there's also an argument that there's no point in trying until we at least have a couple of key technologies: fusion, very good automated manufacturing, and very good robotics. Fusion is key for enabling scalable power and mobility. Automated manufacturing and very good robotics are probably key to self-sufficiency.

Trying to do the "real space age" before the key technologies exist might be akin to, say, trying to start the EV revolution with lead-acid batteries or the PC revolution with vacuum tubes. While it's technically possible to try, it's just not going to "take."

I just had a filling replaced at the dentist yesterday and when he was grinding away at it to shape it, I would get a terrible whiff of something like gunpowder. It was quite disturbing.

But now I can just tell everyone my tooth is filled with moon dust.