There's a Cave Under the Moon. NASA and China Both Want In

About 250 miles from where Apollo 11 landed, there is a hole in the Moon more than a hundred meters deep - and in 2024, radar showed it opens sideways into a cave. Now NASA has picked a team to probe another one, and engineers in China have sketched plans to live inside these tunnels. The Moon's surface swings more than 500 degrees Fahrenheit between day and night, and radiation there is roughly 200 times Earth's surface level (measured by China's Chang'e-4). Lava tubes could shelter people from all of it. We cover how lava tubes form, Kaguya's 2009 discovery of the Marius Hills pit, the 200+ pits found by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, the 2022 finding that a shaded pit may stay near 63 degrees Fahrenheit, the 2024 radar evidence of a cave below the Mare Tranquillitatis pit, NASA's new GIMLI investigation (selected Sept 30, 2026), a Chinese lava-tube base concept, caves on Mars, and the hard problems of getting inside. If you were planning the first long stay on the Moon, would you build at the sunlit south pole or move into a cave near the equator? Tell us in the comments. Music: Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 - http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b... Sources: NASA (nasa.gov, Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, Scientific Visualization Studio, JPL Photojournal), Nature Astronomy (Carrer et al., July 2024), Geophysical Research Letters (Horvath et al., 2022), Science Advances (Chang'e-4 radiation, 2020), the Planetary Science Institute, and reporting on a lava-tube concept presented by the Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology. GIMLI has no public launch date yet; the Chinese base is a concept, not an approved mission; cave sizes beyond the radar measurement are unknown. Visualizations are computer models built from spacecraft data; concept images are artist impressions. #NASA #Moon #MoonCave