Yan Xinjue had originally thought that after seeing the Moon Palace spacecraft, there would be nothing left worth surprising him. Everything worth being amazed by had already been seen along the way here.
However, when the expedition station staff member named Ma Hao drove the lunar rover and brought him near the Lunar Research Base, the sight before him deeply shocked him once again.
Across the vast flatlands, enormous silver-white "eggs" were embedded in the pockmarked lunar soil. Their white hexagonal shells gleamed brightly. Each giant egg covered a considerable area, roughly ten meters in diameter and two or three people tall at its center. From the outside, they looked remarkably like sci-fi versions of Mongolian yurts.
"...Is this the expedition station?"
"This?" Ma Hao glanced in the direction Yan Xinjue was looking and laughed as he drove. "Of course not. Who would live in a place like that... That's our vegetable garden."
Yan Xinjue paused slightly.
"Vegetable garden?"
"The technical term is Lunar Soilless Cultivation Unit. Its exterior is coated with a special Graphene Semiconductor material, which can withstand relatively minor meteorite impacts. It allows some light through while absorbing excess light energy and converting it into electricity to power the supplemental grow lights inside."
The Moon had enormous temperature differences between day and night. Daytime temperatures could reach 127°C, while nighttime temperatures could fall to -183°C. Its day-night cycle lasted as long as 27.32 days, making the growing environment exceptionally harsh. Moreover, because the Moon had no atmosphere and lunar surface material had low heat capacity and thermal conductivity, figuring out how to retain solar energy during the daylight period had become one of the major difficulties of lunar cultivation.
Based on technology from Biosphere A, the Lunar Soilless Cultivation Unit now designed by the Jinling Institute for