Lunar Base Construction Overview

Previous lunar missions and campaigns have been restricted to using robotic landers and lunar
orbiting satellites as well as sortie type of operations using astronaut crews (NASA Apollo
program). Now, the next phase of lunar exploration has begun under NASA’s Artemis program
and there has been an international response where other nations such as China, Russia, India,
Canada, Japan and the European Union of nations, have all expressed interest in either
collaborating or competing with NASA on the Moon. This next phase has an over arching goal
of achieving a permanent human presence on the Moon via sustainable methods.

A lunar base with human occupancy will require infrastructure to provide shelter, utilities,
landing/launch pads, roads, communications, power and all the other necessities to sustain
human life and protect equipment. Since human biology is not well suited for surviving in the
lunar environment, there will be many forms of automated equipment, autonomy and robotic
helpers that will minimize the amount of Extra-Vehicular Activity (EVA) required by the crew.
This will mean that the radiation dosage received by the crew will stay within acceptable and
safe career doses. Radiation shielding via the use of regolith can also mitigate radiation dangers.

The required infrastructure must be constructed, but the mass and logistics of bringing all the
construction materials from Earth are prohibitive, which makes the necessary construction
difficult to achieve. In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) aims to solve this challenge by sourcing
construction materials locally or “in-situ”. This means that their transportation can be completely eliminated, resulting in large cost savings by avoiding the launch out of Earth’s deep gravity well and subsequent trans lunar injection, lunar orbit capture and landing.

This paper will give an overview of the required construction tasks and related equipment that
will be required to robotically build a lunar base using in-situ resources. It will also organize
these tasks into logical groupings so that technology development and implementation can be
pursued within a framework that can be referenced by all involved.