Quite some time had passed since the Lunar Surface Research Station was completed. The permanent population on the Moon had nearly doubled every year, reaching more than fifty people by now.
However, this population growth was not without limits.
Starting this year, the Lunar Orbital Construction Committee announced that it would restrict the increase in the number of permanent lunar residents in the short term. It also required the management authority to keep the number of permanent personnel at the Lunar Surface Research Station below sixty, while maintaining the current scientific research and lunar resource development plans.
This arrangement was not entirely because, as people imagined, the cost of supporting an astronaut in space was too high. The real problem was that conditions simply did not allow it.
Like the sanitation issues faced by many megacities, although the population of the Lunar Surface Research Station was nowhere near city level, the lack of an ecosystem capable of naturally decomposing waste caused the difficulty of solving sanitation problems to grow exponentially alongside the population.
Based on the needs of an ordinary adult, roughly one kilogram of household waste was produced each day, with metabolic waste accounting for more than 50 percent. The Lunar Surface Research Station had almost no way to completely dispose of this metabolic waste.
Even though the lunar planting units could consume part of the feces and urine and return organic matter to the cycle, the efficiency of that cycle was far from high.
Combined with contamination from certain bacteria and microorganisms, sanitation safety had become an issue that could no longer be ignored at the Lunar Surface Research Station. Simply transporting that domestic waste back to Earth already consumed the carrying capacity of an entire transport ship.
If the population continued to expand, the Lunar Orbital Construction