"..and for the precious things put forth by the Moon:" Toward Foundational Infrastructure in cis-Lunar Space.
- Paper ID
96650
- author
- company
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
- country
United States
- year
2025
- abstract
The establishment of cis-lunar foundational infrastructure is critical for creating a vibrant space economy around and on the Moon. Of primary importance to enabling large scale industrial activity is infrastructure for communications, navigation, and power. This infrastructure must provide for communications from and among vehicles, modules, experiments and astronauts on the Lunar surface, precise location of all of these (as well as of craft in cis-Lunar space), as well as for energy storage, and power distribution and generation. Such infrastructure should spread throughout and outward from the initial surface assets of the Moon2Mars Program near the South Pole and from communications/navigation/power nodes in Lunar orbit. The demand for these services may ultimately grow as industrialization spreads toward the Lunar Equator. NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate (STMD) and its Lunar Surface Innovation Consortium (LSIC) are tasked with supporting the development of the technological building blocks needed by industry to create this infrastructure and with coordinating the demand signals necessary to attract private capital toward its creation. These building blocks must be reliable and durable for a decade or more in the cis-Lunar surface thermal, dust, and radiation environment. The highest priority building blocks include: nuclear fission, solar, and radioisotope power generation, suites of maintainable power management and avionics circuits, power transmission cables, optical power and communications beams, and regenerative fuel cell and battery energy storage operable at the cryogenic temperatures of the permanently shadowed regions. NASA is supporting industry in creating the intellectual property necessary for these building blocks through a range of contractual and partnership vehicles, and the LSIC is coordinating the broad community in identifying demand signals. This paper provides a high-level overview of NASA STMD’s plans for the encouragement of foundational infrastructure in cis-Lunar space, a description of the state of the art, capability goals, technical challenges and gaps, and thoughts on partnerships with industry and government agencies towards developing a robust foundational infrastructure to support a Lunar economy.