John S. Rinehart was the director of the Mining Research Laboratory at the Colorado School of Mines when he published a description of a novel lunar base design in the pages of the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society in 1959. His design reflected humanity's limited grasp of spaceflight health issues and lunar surface conditions at the dawn of the space age.
According to Rinehart, the U.S. Army satellite Explorer 3 (26 March-27 June 1958), after Explorer 1 and Vanguard 1 the third American satellite to orbit the Earth, had shown that the cosmic-ray threat in space was greater than previously supposed. He concluded, however, that space radiation probably would not pose a health hazard to astronauts, though long exposure to radiation might discolor plastics or glass. The real threat, claimed Rinehart, would come from bullet-like meteoroids, so all lunar buildings would need a sturdy meteoroid shield.
He reported that many scientists believed that the moon's basalt or solidified dust surface would support a spacecraft's weight, while others theorized that a sea of fluid-like dust miles deep covered the moon. "With this lack of knowledge and this great divergence of opinion," Rinehart wrote, one could do "little else. . .but design the building as a structure which floats in a stationary ocean of dust." He added that "in many ways its construction will resemble that of a ship at anchor[:] a free-floating, self-contained unit."
The base design resulting from Reinhart's lunar environmental assumptions resembled a quonset hut (half-cylinder) with half-dome ends. An observatory with a segmented metal door would make up one end. The floating base would also include living quarters, labs, a control tower for communications/traffic control, life support apparatus, and a machine shop/equipment maintenance area. Cables would suspend a 1/32-inch-thick micrometeoroid shield over the base, leaving exposed only the observatory half-dome and control tower. The floating lunar building would be assembled from prefabricated aluminum parts shipped from Earth.
Reference
"Basic Criteria for Moon Building," John S. Rinehart, Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, Vol. 17, September-October 1959, pp. 126-129.
