LunaSea and PVC—Sounds Crazy But it Works
The lattice of PVC pipes rises 25 feet and looks something like a giant Tinkertoy—except that it’s on the ocean floor, and assembling it is far from child’s play. This is LunaSea, an in-water task training exercise for astronauts in NASA’s Extreme Environment Mission Operations (NEEMO) program.
On the 11th NEEMO excursion in September 2006, the astronauts lived in Aquarius, NASA’s underwater habitat, in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary, 52 feet below the surface. Building LunaSea took three separate dives; two-person teams worked outside and one member remained in Aquarius, procedure in hand, guiding the builders. All told, for the base and three modules of the tower (each 4ft.x4 ft.), a ladder with supports, plus a mast and solar array, LunaSea used about 200 PVC components, including pipes, elbows, and T-joints.
“We decided to use PVC because it is durable, sturdy, and can hold weight,” explained international space station flight controller Alex Moore, one of LunaSea’s designers. “It’s good for the environment,” he added. “It does not corrode or break down. That’s especially important in an area next to a national sanctuary.” Also, it’s inexpensive. If they found they needed extra pieces, he said, they just went to a hardware store.
A favorite team-building exercise on numerous NEEMO missions, the project is always a challenge. Sometimes the current carries pieces away; sometimes there’s a visibility problem. NASA spokesperson Kylie Clem explained, “The exercise promotes crew skills of planning a complex task, following a procedure, and handing over from team to team the tasks involved in multiple construction activities.”
LunaSea has a more nuts-and-bolts purpose as well. It is an experiment to test the idea of building a communication relay station—like a mini cell-phone tower—on the moon so that, in the future, moon walkers outside the space vehicle can be in direct contact with their colleagues on the inside. In the past, they could only speak directly to Mission Control in Houston. (So, for NASA’s LunaSea, there’s method in their madness.)