For silicon based things, the moon would make sense for manufacturers. Is there enough solar energy for something like that? Specifically for smelting and refinement? What materials would need to be shipped in for manufacture?
It's more that it's a very sensitive process with a lot of very delicate steps that'll be hard to setup. To get it started there will be some challenges adapting the processes to the lower gravity I'm sure and if it's not being manufactured on the moon transitioning the machines to microgravity is an even larger challenge. It's also just that those are some of the lighter components so building them on earth and launching them for outfitting in space will be ok for a while.
Also there's a lot of chemicals used in chip manufacturing that we probably can't get on the moon at least at first in addition to just getting the silicon pure enough and the other doping elements.
I'm not sure about the energy requirements but it should be doable.
Yeah ultimately they should be made on site. There's a lot of materials that go into them though that may not be procurable on the moon until there's a much larger mining and refinery operation.
For half the month the lunar surface is basically paradise for solar electricity with 1.3 kw/m2 of sunlight 24 hours a day instead of just the 1.0 kw/m2 on Earth's surface for half the day. But the other half of the month is complete darkness except star and Earth light. Unless you're at one of the poles and rig a solar panel to rotate horizontally.
This is good for industrial processes you can start and stop over the course of a month but life support needs lots of batteries, about 10 times the weight of the solar panels.
That's why most missions are going to be focused around the poles at first until something other that solar is brought to the moon (like nuclear, be it fusion or fission).
That's not how the moon works. There's no "dark side", only a "far side" that always faces away from the earth. It's just that a moon day lasts ~28.5 earth days.
Not that it makes a difference, but I like to investigate things.
Symmetry has made many comments about the Moon, and they are consistent with the comment made here, and in alignment with my understanding of the physics.
For examples: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8959884 says "the only viable colonization sites on the moon are the north and south poles, where you can get solar power continuously." and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14997459#15002984 "The Moon rotates once every month and Mars once every 24 hours. If you're using solar panels it's a big deal making it though the lunar night, you'll need lots of batteries, maybe 25 times the weight of your panels. ... There are the Peaks of Eternal Light on the south pole of the moon where this isn't an issue and you can just keep pointing your solar panels at different parts of the horizon all month." These were made 4 and 2 years ago, respectively.
In a place with lab quality vacuum instead of an atmosphere, at that distance from the sun, I suspect you could use direct focused sunlight for smelting. Not sure if that would be more practical than electric furnaces, though. It would be more efficient, but the setup is less flexible.
My understanding is that the Moon's atmosphere is so tiny, it's a lab quality vacuum. I got this from reading stuff from hard SF author Ben Bova. This might be a bit outdated, however.
> Establishment of a lunar base will degrade the lunar vacuum. The time scale for distribution of exhaust gas across the surface of the moon is much less than the excape lifetime of the gas in the lunar atmosphere, and thus exhaust gas can be approximated as uniformly spread across the surface. A 20 person exploration base will contribute an amount of waste gas on the same order of magnitude as the daytime "natural" atmosphere. A 250 person "industrial" facility would be likely to contribute considerably more due to waste gas from various production processes such as lunar oxygen production and mining of helium 3 from the lunar regolith. This could degrade the lunar ambient to levels on the order of 3 nanotorr, replacing the mostly non-reactive gasses hydrogen, helium, and neon with more reactive gasses containing carbon and oxygen. This vacuum is still good enough to perform many important vacuum processes, such as plasma-deposition of amorphous silicon for solar cells, but processes such as molecular beam epitaxy or locating a intersecting beam accelerator on the moon will require additional vacuum pumping. In any case, though, pumping to ultrahigh vacuum will be much easier on the moon than on Earth.
