Accident at work news
10/04/2007

Toxic lunar dust poses threat to 2020 moon landing

It can be confidently assumed that for an astronaut's job description the probability of an accident at work ranks pretty high on any list of job expectations. Unlike the potential pitfalls of being, say, a taxi driver, in the event of anything going wrong, chances are that an astronaut will not be around to make any claim for personal injury compensation.

Most of us are familiar with the glorified images of the more typical and feted space disasters: exploding rockets fizzing into flames on launch; landing vessels burning up into scattered shrapnel on re-entry.

In fact, 22 astronauts (five per cent of all people who have been in space) have been killed in spaceflights, making it a unique, though predictably so, hotbed for accidents at work.

With plans for a NASA moon landing in 2020 already up and running, a new rather more mundane, though potentially fatal, risk has emerged. A study presented to the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston, Texas, suggests that approximately three per cent of lunar dust might be toxic, causing problems not dissimilar to those experienced by miners and carpenters who developed lung conditions as a result of inhaling asbestos particles (many of who have gone on to make successful personal injury compensation claims).

Following the last, and so far only, moon landing, astronaut Jack Schmitt spoke of suffering from 'lunar dust hay fever' after his dust-spattered space suit contaminated the habituation module.

One solution mooted for this problem, which risks offending the sensibilities of traditionally-minded gardeners right across the UK, is to send robots up to the moon in advance of any landing-party to 'pave' future landing areas by firing microwaves at the lunar soil, though one can't help but worry that anything involving robots firing microwaves in a single sentence risks creating an accident at work of unprecedented magnitude.

To discover more about the planned 2020 moon landing and the problems posed by lunar dust go to: www.nasa.gov.