I reckon... instead of little sealed capsules here and there between which you have to travel in sealed vehicles or in sealed spacesuits (which seems to be the predominant vision of lunar colonisation) it would be a better idea to enclose vast swaths of lunar land under thick, transparent flexible plastic sheeting, strung from towers at various intervals, and possibly largely supported by the pressure of the air inside. At earth-sea-level pressure, it would easily be able to support the canopy against the zero-pressure on the outside. With the canopy soaring above the ground maybe 500 or 1000 feet high, whole cities and even farms and whatever could be set up under it. It would also be easily expandable... you want to extend it, build the new bit, join it at the edge, fill it with air, and remove the vertical division between the two (the former exterior wall of the enclosing envelope at that point). Lunar cities and settlement could grow and grow in a similar way to settlement on earth. As with any construction on the moon, structural engineering would be a lot easier, since any given girder, stanchion, truss or cable or any other structural component, can support six times the mass that it could on earth. The only real hazard would be micrometeorites puncturing the envelope, but I guess some kinda sensor mesh layed across it would be able to identify the site of any such hole and it could be sealed quickly enough. Possibly the material could be self-sealing to some degree, similar to the self-sealing fuel tanks on military aircraft.
You'd lose air do to osmosis beneath plastic. Hell you lose air do to osmosis beneath metal - the more surface area you have the more air you'd lose. For your idea to work, you'd have to find a local source of something that you could convert just to keep the environment breathable.
Bigger meteorites are a problem. Oh, and the fact that a lunar day has about +100 degrees C while a lunar night has around -150 degrees C. That's a lot of air conditioning for such a large structure. Better to blast a base into the rock. A thick layer of rock protects from temperature changes, meteorites, and it'll tell everybody who visits in a few million years that yes, we were here at some point.
Your biggest problem and expense is getting construction equipment and material to the moon. The air-supported tent idea is just fine - "air structures" are a fairly common thing already, and go as big as sports stadium roofs. Now you jusy have to eitehr transport all that air to the moon, or generate it from the regolith. Either option sounds time consuming and expensive.
That's only a good idea if you want to die from radiation. The only way people will live on the moon (in the near future, anyway) is for them to live IN the moon. And we'd be better off skipping the moon altogether and colonizing Mars. Compared to the moon, Mars is about 1,000,000 x more hospitable. And again, a plug for Dr. Robert Zubrin's book "The Case for Mars". Read it today!!
Yup, apart from the gravity living on the surface of the moon is no different radiation wise than floating in orbit, with the added downside that you are without sun for weeks at a time.
It's actually not that hard to generate oxygen on the Moon. All you need to do is heat the soil up to over 1,000F and it starts spewing out oxygen. If the French can build a solar furnace which gets hot enough to melt steel, then I think that on a place like the Moon, where there's ample sunlight and no atmosphere to block the furnace, you should have no problems getting the correct temps.
I doubt it. The lunar regolith isn't soil at all- if this is a terrestrial process you've read about, I seriously doubt it would work on the moon. Either way, I'm interested enough in the thought that if you have a link it would be appreciated.
This is why colonizing the Moon is key to colonizing the entire system. The vast majority of the raw materials needed are there, with only 1/6th gee and no atmosphere to overcome to get it into orbit.
