MoonPhase

 

It's been 12 months since this was made available to paying punters on Patreon, so it is time to release it to the rest of you. This completes my 2021 mini-trilogy of moon-stories, which began with MoonCrime and continued with MoonBeach.

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MoonPhase

Welcome, welcome. Yes, we all know what you’re here for but we have to go through the history before we get there. Not to worry madam, I shall speak quickly. It will be hardly painful at all.

As you no doubt know the key discovery was water ice in the north polar crater. There were several proposed ways to access it. Orbital mirrors reflecting solar rays was a favourite, or perhaps using surplus nuclear warheads from the Earth’s obsolete stockpiles. Don’t laugh sir, the radiation would hardly be higher than that of standing on the unprotected surface. The drawback of both these two would be that the water would be spread across the entire landscape, some escaping the sphere of influence entirely.

So the hybrid mining/melting method was devised, the machines working to this day, pumping ice-water down to lower latitudes where we get the sun to allow us to work. You’ll have seen the pipeline on your way in if you were looking for it – and now you’ll know to look for it when you leave!

Then the hard work began. Soil is a dynamic substance, one that has living components. To create it from scratch in this environment – where even the concrete and glass leach oxygen out of the atmosphere – it was a challenge. Without a ready buffer of organic material it crashed more than once, leaving us with dead dust.

Yes, I know young man, we’re getting there.

Once you have soil – tonnes and tonnes of it – you can grow grass, and then there’s just the expense of shipping the livestock. A long way and out of the gravity well. And of course the low pressure, low gravity conditions… still as you can see we managed.

Here we find ourselves in the creamery and now, on behalf of the Jumping Cow Dairy I’d like to invite you to try the very first batch of green cheese made entirely on the Moon.

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