Abstract
…For the focus of this paper, I analyze whether a permanent lunar base is physically and economically plausible if I approach the problem from first principles. I separate the idea into four scales being a small robotic outpost, a small human-tended research base, a permanently crewed scientific base, and a large industrial settlement. With almost all endeavors it’s crucial to approach this analysis with the potential of different scales. As a project scales up or down, we often see the new scale does not follow uniformly with all others. I then examine the governing constraints which are launch energy, Δ𝑣, lunar gravity, radiation, thermal control, solar power, energy storage, pressurized habitat loads, regolith (damaging, top layer dust) shielding, life-support mass flow, build timeline, and delivered cost. First, I show that the Moon is close enough to be reachable in a serious engineering sense (which may seem trivial but not enough to omit from a first principles perspective), but still expensive enough that every unnecessary kilogram matters. Next, I show that the Moon's low gravity helps with construction and local transport, but does not remove the hardest problems, which are radiation protection, thermal survival through the long lunar night, and the mass penalty of keeping humans alive in vacuum. After that, I compare Earth-supplied construction with regolith- based shielding and demonstrate why replacement of local material for construction is not optional for any meaningful long-duration base. I then estimate solar array area and storage mass for representative base sizes and show why polar sites with high illumination are most attractive. Finally, I argue that a Moon base is physically plausible in the near to medium term at small scientific scales, constrained at permanent scientific scale in the medium term, and not economically plausible as a large industrial settlement until local materials, local shielding, and power distribution architectures reduce delivered mass sharply. My final conjecture is that the most realistic early lunar architecture is not a single self-contained base, but a split polar system in which power generation and habitation are separated geographically to beat the storage problem.(Image credit: NASA) https://www.space.com/21289-private-manned-moon-missions-nasa.html