The mobile tunnel

Last week one Matthew Williams posted Retractable, Pressurized Tunnels (h/t Zim). This is to connect surface assets 'pon an airless surface. One solution is called the TREAD; the other (which nobody is linking right) is the LATCH.

Sure: longish-term d00dz (between returns to Earth or at least to the Spaceline's appendix-C-2) will layover in a lavatube or, later, a kilometers-high Eiffel. But workers will be going out on the surface. Also someone's got to fix up that lavatube in the first place. Problem: EVA sucks.

The projects assume that the initial settlement of, say, the Lunar South Pole colony will be shambolic. Various Earth companies are each sending their own Quonset huts or bare Starship husks, and scattering them all over the surface. They may or mayn't send the covered hallways between them; astronauts will prefer covered hallways over EVA.

NASA are telling the Quonset vendors not to bother hooking up those huts. This TREAD is a single habitable hallway on wheels as can attach two huts. Temporarily: before disconnecting from one hut and attaching another one. Some huts will simply be abandoned or dismantled, or moved, in the process of just-in-time colony planning and construction. The LATCH is similar: less mass per meter, but the corridor can't snake around. The TREAD I think wins this one.

For TREAD anyway they're folding the hallway back when not in use. To let the dust fall to the floor and to protect it from micrometeors and whatever else is kicked up around the surface. As such - and because static-electric dust exists - more wear and tear is expected than on, say, that old inflatable Bigelow on the ISS.