NASA plans to build a railway station, run trains on the Moon

A train on the Moon. Yes, as countries rush to the lunar surface, this time with plans for bolder, bigger missions and plans to develop fully functioning bases, a train is not a far-fetched idea.

NASA wants to build the first fully functioning railway station on the Moon to provide reliable, autonomous, and efficient payload transport around the lunar surface. But, this train will be a bit different from what we have on Earth.

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Being dubbed the Flexible Levitation on a Track (Float), the system will use magnetic levitation over a 3-layer flexible film track. These will be unpowered magnetic robots that levitate over the graphite layer and passively float over tracks using diamagnetic levitation.

Nasa said that the FLOAT robots will have no moving parts and levitate over the track to minimize lunar dust abrasion or wear, unlike lunar robots with wheels, legs, or tracks. These tracks unroll directly onto the lunar regolith to avoid major on-site construction – unlike conventional roads, railways, or cableways.

The Float design robots will be able to transport payloads of varying shapes at 0.5 meters per second, while a large-scale FLOAT system will be capable of moving up to 1,00,000 kg of regolith multiple kilometers per day.

“FLOAT will operate autonomously in the dusty, inhospitable lunar environment with minimal site preparation, and its network of tracks can be rolled up and reconfigured over time to match evolving lunar base mission requirements,” NASA said.

As the work progresses, phase 2 of the development will see the design, manufacture, and test a series of sub-scale robots, track prototypes, culminating with a demonstration in a lunar-analogue testbed and investigating the impact of environmental effects on system performance and longevity.

“A durable, long-life robotic transport system will be critical to the daily operations of a sustainable lunar base in the 2030’s, as envisioned in the Moon to Mars plan and mission concepts like the Robotic Lunar Surface Operations 2 (RLSO2),” NASA said.