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

Philip T. Metzger and Greg W. Autry

Papers from arXiv.org

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. 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 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 costs. 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. 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 the current rate \$1M/kg to the lunar surface to \$300K/kg. A landing pad 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.

Date: 2022-04
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://arxiv.org/pdf/2205.00378 Latest version (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:arx:papers:2205.00378

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers from arXiv.org
Bibliographic data for series maintained by arXiv administrators ().