The Cost of Lunar Landing Pads with a Trade Study of Construction Methods

Abstract

This study estimates the cost of building lunar landing pads and examines whether any construction methods are economically superior to others. Some proposed methods require large amounts of mass transported from the Earth, others require high energy consumption on the lunar surface, and others have a long construction time. Each of these factors contributes direct and indirect costs to lunar activities. To identify the most favorable construction method and to evaluate the overall price range, these disparate factors have been quantified in terms of cost and combined in a trade study. The most important economic variables turn out to be the transportation cost to the lunar surface and the magnitude of the program delay cost imposed by a construction method. The program delay cost is the incremental value of a lunar outpost that will be lost because of the delay imposed by the construction time, i.e., a “lack of opportunity cost.” This study finds that the cost of a landing pad depends sensitively on the optimization of the mass and speed of the construction equipment, so a minimum-cost set of equipment exists for each construction method within a specified economic scenario. Several scenarios have been analyzed across a range of transportation costs with both high and low program delay cost assumptions. It is found that microwave sintering is currently the most favorable method to build the inner, high temperature zone of a lunar landing pad, although other methods are within the range of uncertainty. The most favorable method to build the outer, low temperature zone of the landing pad is also sintering when transportation costs are high, but it switches to polymer infusion when transportation costs drop below about $110K/kg to the lunar surface. Several additional sensitivities are identified: the thickness of the pads is important (baking pavers gains advantage over microwave sintering when the pad is thinner); reliability is not a major factor (the least reliable system requires about 50% additional development cost to achieve target reliability, but development costs are shown to be only a minor part of the overall costs); and the lunar program’s launch cadence sets a practical limit on the economic benefit of faster construction. It is estimated that the Artemis Basecamp could build a landing pad with a budgeted line-item cost of $229M assuming that transportation costs will be reduced modestly from their current rate ~$1M/kg to the lunar surface to $300K/kg. It drops to $130M when the transportation cost drops further to $100K/kg, or to $47M if transportation costs fall below $10K/kg. Ultimately, landing pads can be built around the Moon at very low cost, due to economies of scale.