Buhl Planetarium's "Blueprints to Blastoff" program, looks far into the future at the possibiities of what the initial going back to the Moon landing site at Shackleton Crater may someday become. A permanent domed Lunar city is one "sciene-fiction-like" concept. But in reality, the low Lunar gravity might allow for constructing enormous structures impossible to consider on Earth. Materials made from the Lunar regolith [soil] similar to Earth's concrete or "lunarcrete" as it would be called, could be strong enough to build impressive Moon structures giving Lunar architects thoughts of award winning creations.
The dome might be constructed easily with the low gravity allowing a suspension bridge style engineering creation. The 12 mile wide crater's dome would be high enough [3 miles] to have its own weather inside with clouds hanging over a modular styled city, buildings reaching extreme heights, again because of the low gravity. Roads, forests, farming and a spaceport would all be possible allowing for the inhabitants to be a self sustaining community.
The program is presented using the Buhl's new E&S 8K Digistar7 fulldome video system in the planetarium's 50 foot dome [immersive but much smaller than the Shackleton Crater's dome]... with 10 - 4K video projectors fed by 10 syncronized computers, filling the dome with high definition imagery. A 5.1 Surround audio track completes the immersive experience.
The video here is showing a wide front view of the 360 degree immersive experience. "Blueprints to Blastoff" will be distributed by the Buhl Planetarium to any planetariums requesting the program as part of the NASA educational grant's specifications. |
