COLORADO (US): The next time Nasa goes to the Moon, it intends to stay. Under the Artemis programme, the US space agency plans to maintain a human presence, for the very first time, on a celestial body other than Earth.

But building a lunar base is no small feat. It will need power generators, vehicles and habitats, and the space industry is racing to meet the technological challenges.

“It’s the Super Bowl of engineering,” Neal Davis, lead systems engineer for the Lunar Terrain Vehicle at space company Dynetics, said.

Dynetics revealed its prototype design for a Moon rover last month at the Space Symposium in Colorado Springs. But it probably won’t be until later Artemis missions — 7 onwards — “where we’re starting to look at adding permanent habitations on the surface,” said Nasa associate administrator Jim Free.

Artemis 3, the first planned landing, won’t happen until later this decade, so habitat building wouldn’t start before the 2030s.

The base would likely comprise multiple sites, he added, to diversify the targets of scientific exploration and to offer more flexibility for the landings. Despite this distant timeline, companies are already chomping at the bit.

“Step zero is communications,” Joe Landon, CEO of Crescent Space, a new subsidiary of Lockheed Martin dedicated to lunar services, said.

“Think about when you move into a new apartment, you’ve got to hook up your phone and your internet first.” Starting out with a pair of satellites, the company wants to become the Moon’s internet and GPS provider.

This would relieve the strain on Nasa’s Deep Space Network, which threatens to overheat in the face of all the upcoming missions, including private ones.

Landon estimates the value of the lunar market will be “$100 billion over the next 10 years.” Next up: switching on the lights. Astrobotic, with 220 employees, is one of three companies selected by Nasa to develop solar panels.

They need to be placed vertically because at the Moon’s south pole — the intended destination because it has water in the form of ice — the Sun barely peeps above the horizon.

About 60 feet high, the Astrobotic panels will be connected by cables running several kilometers, said Mike Provenzano, the company’s director of lunar surface systems.

Published in Dawn, May 5th, 2023