Category Technology Challenges

Human civilization now encompasses the inner Solar System and this outward de­velopment from Earth has resulted in advances for humanity that could not have been predicted at the onset. We generally think linearly – we are best at extrapolat­ing our current experiences and usually miss paradigm shifts due to unanticipated discoveries. In the year 1807, very few people anticipated the Wright Brothers’

Yerah Timoshenko is a pseudonym for Haym Benaroya.

human flight a hundred years later. In 1869, only science fiction writers envisioned landing people on the Moon...

Yerah Timoshenko*

Rutgers University, Piscataway, New Jersey, USA

30.1 Introduction

Since humans returned to the Moon, we went from being an outpost on a barren rock orbiting Earth to being a nascent civilization on the Moon and Mars, with outposts on dozens of asteroids, outer planets and their moons. We went from a population of under a dozen to one approaching 300,000 extraterrestrials.

But our impact is larger than what one may expect of that many people. A city on Earth of that population is considered small, perhaps peripheral to the main avenues of power and influence. The 300,000 people who are today distributed throughout large sectors of the Solar System are all prime movers. Each of us has significant responsibilities. We oversee an infrastructure that is vast and very wealthy...

Each of the preceding areas poses special management problems. None of the ma­nagerial concerns identified, with the possible exceptions of those that hit religious or cultural hot buttons, are inherently so problematic as to encourage a competent manager to run screaming from the Moon if taken individually. That can be described as the good news. However, taken together and probably simultaneous­ly, the management workload for even the most simple of lunar operations will be significant. Current managerial training does not train people to be the sort of managers that will be needed to successfully run a lunar base, community, busi­ness or businesses, and keep staff, employees, families, both working and living at peak efficiency and effectiveness...

What lies beyond the boundaries of traditional management are the things that of­ten do not get discussed. Relationships were described in a previous section in the context of privacy. However, managers could still pretend that they do not know what may be going on behind the closed door. Unfortunately, once large numbers of people work and live within a lunar facility, traditional limits on what a manag­er needs to know in terms of private information or even private behavior may change. The distinction between public and private may not be able to maintain the same boundaries on the Moon as it does on earth. The limited number of people available might suggest or even require extreme care in selection of indi­viduals with no communicable diseases...

Community as a concept is fairly simple. A group of people who work and live together come to know and appreciate all of the strengths and weaknesses of their respective group mates. Large numbers of individuals living, working and inte­racting for long periods of time in large communities is rare apart from some large expatriate communities. People seldom live and work in the same place. People who do live and work in the same place usually do so for limited periods and in some fairly restrictive environments as within military or science missions. The Moon would represent a different situation. The lunar facility would expand as time passed and evolve from a simple outpost to a much more diverse operation that may mirror a small city...

Only in rare circumstances, such as in the off-shore oil industry, are general man­agers concerned about employee living arrangements. It is often necessary for managers in remote locations or where housing and/or work facilities are limited or extremely expensive to manage living arrangements. Managerial intrusions are generally limited, even in such circumstances. The Moon will require more signif­icant and regular managerial oversight of habitation issues. Operational efficiency will be greatly affected by employee ability to rest and relax in off hours. The Moon will be a 24/7 operating environment and managers will be unable to ignore any issue that affects or might affect worker safety, morale or effectiveness...

Few managers are acutely concerned with health care except as an issue related to benefits. In that context, a manager is often more concerned with the cost of health insurance to his/her employees and by extension to his/her organization than with the underlying health care process. Lunar-based managers will by necessity view health care and its associated technologies as a critical component in the overall operation of their facility. Managing a facility on the Moon will require self­sufficiency, particularly in health care, that exceeds the most rigorous require­ments for long duration activities at remote locations on earth. Appropriate medical facilities and trained personnel on site would be absolutely essential...

What does it take for people to want to live and ultimately enjoy living and working on the Moon over an extended period of time? What are the prerequisites for high job satisfaction, resulting in consistently high job performance? Lunar operations will no doubt be facing some of the same issues that other small communities face. Of course, the special physical circumstances that basically seal this community off will only intensify certain problems like, for example, those resulting from feelings of isolation and confinement (Ryan and Kutschera 2007, p. 46).

The management of people in isolation poses a number of special problems for managers. Simulations of long duration space voyages by the Russians have

provides mixed results...