Building On The Moon with NASA

Interview with Nader Khalili of Cal-Earth Institute: Hesperia, California

I presented these ideas to NASA at the National Academy of Sciences in 1984 for building on the moon. I presented how you can pick up the soil there and solar-fire it into ceramics, take the bags and fill them. Five years later, they told me that eight-minute talk I'd given in Houston had changed so many minds. All of a sudden they realized, why take all these materials to the moon? Why pollute that place? Why so much expense? I was invited to Los Alamos National Laboratory to interact with the scientists; they all had the knowledge, but we were bringing together these ancient concepts so it could form something for the future. Your own inner life wants to simplify everything, and we don't allow it. Everything comes to simplification for us here. Music is made up of a scale of only seven notes, and everything you make is only made up of four elements, earth, air, water, and fire. You can build anything with that. Why do we build so much with plastic, travertine, asbestos, cut the trees, bring in all these materials? At NASA they said, "Why not?" We can build these things with the materials already on the moon and then bring the solar energy and fire and turn them into ceramics- what do you think ceramics is? And the scientists started to say, "Look, I can give you the microwave, and we"ll just fire it like this (snaps)! And we have these plasma guns, like ray runs!' and we said, "Well, that's OK!"

We discussed all of this at a NASA conference at Princeton. McDonnell Douglas groups came and worked with us in that presentation. We went to Huntington Beach and showed them the concentrated mirror they have, how we can change lunar dust into structures. Right here, we fused material together with the soil. If you learn how to build an arch, all you have to do is a little fusion, a little spot welding, and the whole thing stands up. Or you can take a large pile of soil and start melting it from the top with your solar panel, and a crust will form, like lava. Then you dig out the soil from underneath and youÕve got a structure. These are the concepts that come through. It's like if you look at that seashell, how can that little creature build something like that.

I dared to present these things to NASA because there was a 65 year old man who was a ceramicist. He couldn't write his name, but he would look at the fire and tell you what temperature it was. And he was right. He knew from his eyes and intuition the difference between 1800 degrees, 1600 degrees, 1200 degrees. It took me five years of studying ceramics engineering to understand that you can tell the temperature by color. He already knew that. So when they said to come present my work to NASA for use on the moon, I thought if this man who 't read and write can tell me the temperature of fire, why can't I go and tell NASA how to build on the moon? And I did and they said, "Well, what a great idea!" When I wrote the paper, I had cited names like that mason's name in my bibliography. They wouldn't know where it came from. They probably assumed that these people had many books behind them, but no - it was a man who can tell the temperature of fire! That's the power.