GOLDEN, Colorado — A future where the moon serves as a long-term haven for human explorers is within reach but significant challenges like constructing launch and landing facilities, addressing moonquakes, and developing sustainable infrastructure must be overcome.
The Lunar Surface Innovation Consortium held a launch and landing facilities workshop on July 23, staged by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland. Specialists from NASA, industry and academia took part, all with an eye toward orchestrating an enduring human presence on the lunar landscape.
“Landings and launches are incredibly complex endeavors, and an inflection point in any lunar surface exploration activity,” APL’s Sarah Hasnain, the consortium’s co-lead on lunar excavation and construction, told SpaceNews. “Our sustainable future on the moon starts with the ability to revisit sites and reuse infrastructure and assets there.”
The workshop highlighted interdisciplinary decision-making and technical requirements needed “to ensure the safety and sustainability of systems from the start,” Hasnain said.
Some challenges, such as figuring out how to fabricate launch and landing facilities on the moon, have already fostered considerable research and testing. Other concepts such as robotic construction or the development of excavation tools that operate in harsh lunar conditions have been seeded by NASA through small business research grants.
“I don’t feel there are any showstoppers for the development of lunar launch and landing facilities,” said Erik Franks, who heads a Los Angeles, California-based lunar excavation and construction startup called Cislune.
Cislune, which has several NASA research awards under its belt, has developed a microwave sintering process that takes lunar regolith and converts it into various structures, including landing and launch pads, habitats, and protective barriers. Sintering involves heating materials until they partially melt and fuse together, forming a solid mass. This technique allows for the creation of durable structures using local materials, reducing the need to transport construction materials from Earth.
There is a major opportunity, Franks said, for NASA to utilize the projected uncrewed test run of SpaceX’s Starship human landing system before the Artemis 3 mission – the program’s first crewed landing on the moon. He said that the flight could deploy payloads for test purposes on the lunar surface.
“Continued funding and prioritization of infrastructure building will help make landing facilities a reality,” said Franks.
Wanted: sturdy structures
Kevin Cannon, a senior lunar geologist at Ethos Space Resources in Los Angeles, said any routine moon lander traffic will demand sturdy structures. He points to the pad damage during the liftoff of Starship’s Integrated Flight Test-1 in April 2023.
It doesn’t take much imagination, Cannon said, to figure out that Starship or Blue Origin’s Blue Moon lander will blow giant craters in the ground if they try to land on an unprepared lunar surface.
“Solid landing pads are going to need to be integrated into Artemis, and a lot of the ideas out there, like laying tiles on the ground or spraying the regolith with polymers, will simply not work,” said Cannon.
Blast effects
Similar in view is Patrick Flowers, a materials science department manager at Redwire of Jacksonville, Florida.
Last year, the company received a $12.9 million NASA award for Mason, its Infrastructure Manufacturing with Lunar Regolith initiative. Mason includes a suite of techniques to grade, compact, and sinter local lunar resources to make landing pads, roads and foundations.
Flowers told the consortium participants that moon landing pads must prevent and corral rocket blast effects from hitting and contaminating vital, nearby lunar hardware.
What’s shaking?
Planting habitats and landing pads on the moon could be off to a shaky start, as any lunar infrastructure faces the added challenge of “moonquakes,” said Nerma Caluk, a designer for Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, an architecture and structural engineering firm in San Francisco, California.
Caluk said seismic events already detected on the moon suggest that if a moonquake’s epicenter was close to a human-occupied locale, it could damage landing pads, berms, tall towers, habitats, equipment shelters and other structures by causing fatigue-induced cracks.
“In order to properly design for such lateral loads, data on the seismic activity from the actual base camp site, in this case being the lunar south pole, is required,” Caluk said
This data is currently nonexistent, Caluk cautioned, since the seismometers of the Apollo missions were set up near the moon’s equator.
“The application of conventional terrestrial seismic design of structures may require a different approach, once more data is obtained from future lunar seismometers,” Caluk told SpaceNews.
Guidelines in the making
Preliminary considerations for dealing with moonquakes are being drafted into the Lunar Infrastructure Engineering, Design, Analysis, and Construction (LIEDAC) guidelines.
Those preliminary guidelines, University of Connecticut engineering professor Ramesh Malla tells SpaceNews, are essential to successfully establishing on the moon human habitats, solar power generation and distribution facilities, launch and landing pads, mining facilities and communication facilities, as well as roadways. Malla is spearheading the LIEDAC activity within the American Society of Civil Engineers.
“Since civil engineers have been doing the same work in one form or other from the beginning of human civilization here on Earth, including in harsh and challenging environments, they should and will play a key role in planning, designing, analyzing and building infrastructure on the moon,” Malla said.
The guidelines, said Malla, will highlight practical engineering necessities, centered on key areas like the necessary materials, environmental impact, geotechnical and foundation engineering, structural design and analysis, and architecture. The goal is to provide directions for short, medium and long-term missions and operations on the moon.
Malla said future work on the moon faces novel challenges, “as there are no guidelines or codes currently to design and build infrastructure on the moon as those we have on Earth.”