The first home for the astronauts going to the Moon will be Italian

The first major difficulty is due to the absence of an atmosphere, which allows cosmic rays to reach the ground without problems, and for humans they can be lethal beyond a certain amount.

If there is no atmosphere, it is obvious that one cannot even think of breathing, so the astronauts' suits must act both as shields for cosmic rays and energetic particles arriving from the Sun and as systems in which air and water are guaranteed as a minimum. In practice, contrary to what one might think, they are actual spaceships protecting the space workers. As other functions, we can add that the spacesuits must allow for radio communication, power supply and more; if we consider that the astronauts must also move as easily as possible to get around and work, we understand that the design of these envelopes is not easy, which often makes the astronauts look clumsy. On the Moon, gravity is one-sixth that of the Earth: a 60 kg person there 'weighs' only 10 kg, with the result, visible in the films of the Apollo missions of more than 50 years ago full of falls, of having to learn to walk on lunar soil.

The lack of atmosphere then creates a big problem with the temperature, which ranges from 150 degrees to -150, to get an idea, and is very sharp, in the sense that, ideally, if we were exactly where the solar illumination ends and we spread our arms one hand, in the illuminated part, would be at 150 and the other would freeze at -150. You can see that these are not simple conditions to take into account.

Lastly, and certainly not better than the other conditions, we have the problem of the dust, very fine, a practically uniform layer of many centimetres, which sticks to the astronauts' suits and vehicles, penetrates everywhere in a pervasive manner, blocking or even contributing to the breakage of instruments and mechanisms, starting with the wheels of the rovers, as has happened several times. Think of the problems induced by the dust attached to the astronauts' suits when they return to the living quarters: a real nightmare.

From this list of problems, which we have not exaggerated, it is clear that it is not just a matter of building a kind of lunar bivouac, similar to the high-altitude terrestrial ones, but of designing a very sophisticated, safe and efficient structure for the lunar programme of this century. Thales Alenia Space, with its partners in this endeavour, will arrive at the definition for construction in a couple of years: a launch to the Moon is planned for 2033, certainly hoping that the current impasse on launchers will be overcome. In fact, we are in a critical situation, both because of the problems linked to the unfortunate choice of Nasa's SLS launcher, which has been revised and upgraded and has already caused delays of years with respect to the schedule, and because of the substantial failure of the last test launches of Elon Musk's Starship, the largest and most powerful rocket ever designed.