This Train Terminates At: The Moon?
The U.S. space agency NASA is dreaming of a train on the moon. Unlike the trains on Earth, it will hover rather than roll on tracks. This may sound like science fiction, but the possibility of actually building a lunar train is coming closer.
Once it was enough to have taken ‘a small step’, but now NASA is dreaming of a permanently inhabited moon base. This could be used – even further in the future – as an intermediate stop for frequent trips to Mars.
FLOAT
The science fiction-like plans include developing a whole lunar ecosystem: with a miniature nuclear reactor, a modern lunar cabin, a lunar car ... AND a lunar railway. This will be created using the Flexible Levitation on a Track (FLOAT) project, which NASA intends to use to move cargo loads quickly across the moon. The project was first proposed in 2021 and it has now been selected for further consideration.
Floating robots
FLOAT will not look like a train on Earth. There will be no carriages and no rails, just robots hovering above a flexible track. The track will consist of three layers: a layer of graphite that can make the robots hover via diamagnetism (an invisible force that repels certain materials when you place them in a magnetic field), a flex-circuit layer to create electromagnetic thrust to move the robots along the track in a controlled manner, and a thin-layer solar panel to generate electricity.
Image: NASA/Ethan Schaler
Mission to the moon
These FLOAT tracks can be unrolled directly onto the lunar surface, involving no major construction work on the site. Nevertheless, it will still be some time before the plans come to fruition. The FLOAT train should be operational by the 2030s. First it will be necessary to start sending people to the moon again - otherwise who is going to install and use the train? - and NASA has no plans to do that until 2026 at the earliest.
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