Who You Send to the Moon Matters More Than You Think

Astronauts working together in close proximity and for extended duration causes stress levels to increase. A team of researchers have modelled what this might look like in a lunar base. Image shows Jessica Watkins and Bob Hines working on XROOTS, an experiment using the Veggie facility of the ISS (Credit : NASA)

Building a permanent base on the Moon sounds like an engineering problem. Design the habitat, sort the power supply, figure out life support, and you're most of the way there. But the engineers who've spent time thinking hard about this will tell you the real challenge isn't the hardware — it's the humans inside it. Now researchers have built a virtual Moon base and run tens of thousands of simulated missions inside it, studying not the rocket engines or the radiation shielding, but the astronauts themselves. What they found could reshape how we plan humanity's return to the lunar surface.

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