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A lot of plans for how humans can colonize and work on the moon have been put forth over the past several years.
One NASA official even went so far as to claim that humans will be living on the moon by the end of this decade.
So, considering the fact that not a single building has been built, no power supply for dwellers has been constructed, and no simple way of traveling there and back has been determined, we still have a lot of work to do before that actually happens.
However, one private research company has already received funding from the United States government to build “streetlights” on the moon, so we’ve got that going for us, which is nice.
This is important because each night on the moon is the equivalent of two weeks on Earth. Which is great for hanging out at the world’s first space hotel and bar (scheduled to open in 2027), but bad for being able to see once moon dwellers return home after a long night out.
The company, Honeybee Robotics (part of Blue Origin), that will be putting these lights on the moon also already has a plan for how to do it called the Lunar Utility Navigation with Advanced Remote Sensing and Autonomous Beaming for Energy Redistribution, or LUNARSABER for short.
Honeybee Robotics is one of 14 companies that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) chose to develop a lunar economy in 2023.
The “streetlights” that Honeybee Robotics plans to build on the moon will be 330-feet (100-meters) tall. They will store solar energy during the moon’s days for use in lighting up the lunar nights.
According to Live Science, the reason why these light poles will be so tall is so the light will able to be cast over the rims of huge craters, as well as to elevate almost a ton of science equipment like cameras and communications devices to higher vantage points.
Of course, erecting such colossal structures on the moon poses challenges. To address them, Honeybee engineers have designed an automated system by which each LUNARSABER tower could effectively rise out of its own base, by bending rolled-up bands of metal into towering cylindrical tubes. This means a spacecraft would only have to worry about getting the device’s base onto the moon, with the actual tower rolled up inside.
These light poles could also be used to solve the problem of there being no power supply as a series of them could be networked into a type of power grid.