Science Engineered Timber Lunar Base proposed for 2035

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In ground breaking news for the timber industry, the first non earth mass timber building is in its planning stages. The design brief is for a semi permanent base to house astronauts living and working on the moon for up to 12 months at a time.

The site is a naturally occurring cave which will shield the building’s inhabitants from the sun’s radiation.

As the gravity on the moon is significantly less than on earth, the size of the space craft required to escape the moon’s gravity for the return trip is also smaller. Usually excess space ship parts are jettisoned in space to be burned up in earth’s atmosphere.

Architects are collaborating with space agency engineers to develop a mass timber space craft designed to be partially dismantled leaving its lower stages on the moon to be reconstructed into the lunar habitat.
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My father is a carpenter who solves every problem with wood. We're talking wooden auto repair levels of single mindedness. This is the kind of solution he would appreciate.
 
The best and greatest said:
Supposedly they found a way to make wood as structurally strong as steel but not as heavy so maybe its not as crazy as it sounds?

https://youtube.com/watch?v=96Dz-rQtGxI
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LVL is good stuff. You have individual strength-tested veneers cut from wood that would otherwise have some individual structural defects from knots or other growth characteristics that would completely compromise the overall product if it was cut into full-sized large beams, all laid up and glued together with perfect grain alignment to give something that can deliver all the strength large-scale buildings need while being more economical and in many cases more aesthetic than steel and almost always concrete.

The US military industrial complex startup 'Rocket Lab' is designing rocket stages using carbon fibre structures at the outside, so engineered wood structures for space could potentially be viable. Likely something constructed more like plywood than LVL, with layers laid down at alternating angles to add strength in all directions rather than focusing strength in one axis. Sure, it'd end up getting lightly charred on the outside, but that's an advantage not a liability. Buildings like the Mjostarnet were constructed under the understanding that if someone flew a 767-223ER into them, rather than everyone dying after jet fuel 'melted' (severely structurally weakened through heat soak) steel beams, the process of the beams gradually charring from the outside would give time for residents to escape.
 
I misread party of the title as "lunar timber" and got images of a tree farm on da moon.

That would be cool. Okay bye.
 
there have been zany ideas about lunar exploration for decades. Such as taking off in basically a tray strapped to an engine just wearing your suit and nothing else to save on takeoff weight. Because, what can go wrong? There is no atmosphere and little gravity!

Timber will probably deteriorate in really interesting ways in a vacuum with zero humidity and under low gravity. This is bad science fiction. So yeah nah, we'll be living in shiny silver tents up there being careful not to poke any holes in the film as we do our research.

Get me that moon base so we can start casting alloys in vacuum and lo-g. That's where the intetesting stuff will happen.
 
This sounds like something out of a forgotten Jules Verne novel. Or some kind of weird biopunk idea of space travel.
 
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