 What makes the far side of the moon intolerable?
The shack and the job he filled were located in the medieval notion of the physical appearance of hell. By night—lunar night, of course, and lunar day—it was frigidity and horror. Once in two weeks Earth-time a rocketship came around the horizon from Lunar City with stores for the colony deep underground. The Crack, of course, was that gaping rocky fault which stretches nine hundred miles, jaggedly, over the side of the Moon that Earth never sees. There is nothing like it on Earth, of course. When it was first found, scientists descended into it to examine the exposed rock-strata and learn the history of the Moon before its craters were made. The outside was surface moondust, piled over a tiny dome to be insulation against the cold of night and shadow and the furnace heat of day. There were air-tight bulkheads for safety, and a hydroponic garden to keep the air fresh, and all sorts of things to make life possible for men under if not on the Moon. In the Moon's slight gravity, a man is really adjusted to existence when he has a well-developed case of agoraphobia. All of which happened back on Earth and a long time ago. He usually reached the moondozer about the time the ship began to brake for landing, and he watched it come in. The pilot killed all forward motion just above the field and came steadily and smoothly down to land between the silvery triangles that marked the landing place. And a cover of insulating moondust with vacuum between the grains kept even air frozen solid, though in sunlight. The sun rose very, very slowly in what by convention was called the east. Otherwise, he was wholly matter-of-fact—certainly so for the far side of the Moon. At the same time, liquid air from another tank evaporated to maintain the proper air pressure in the shack. Outside the shack, jagged stony pinnacles reared in the starlight, and craters complained of the bombardment from space that had made them. Writing-material was scarce, but he spent most of the time between two particular rocket-landings getting down on paper exactly how a child had looked while sleeping, some fifteen years before. The sun rose, and baked the abomination of desolation which was the moonscape. The occupation made it absurdly easy to live on the surface of the far side of the Moon, whether anybody else could do it or not.
 extreme temperatures
 extreme temperatures  loud noises from the mines  social isolation  vicious predators