This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: The discovery of water in dark craters at the moon's poles has sparked a "moon rush" to establish bases there, followed by villages, cities and heavy industry. How sustainable is this rush?
Soon after the moon was formed, asteroids bombarded it, creating its pockmarked topography. Near the moon's poles, there are dozens of crater floors that have not seen direct sunlight in about 4 billion years. Many of these cryogenically cold "pits of eternal darkness" are below a temperature of 110K, forming "cold traps" in which water ice won't sublimate away by more than a millimeter in a billion years, even in the vacuum at the moon's surface.
And there is water to freeze: Some of those asteroids brought it along with them. Since 2013, we have known that water is still there, possibly as much as 1 billion tons (910 million tonnes), thanks to a succession of moon-orbiting missions that have mapped likely locations in increasing detail. The presence of water at the lunar poles changes everything about human visits to the moon.
Suddenly, it is practical to envision a "moon village" where people could survive without importing every last bit from Earth. They could grow their own food and have showers and functional toilets, unlike the astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS). This possibility has sparked ambitions from people like Jeff Bezos to move heavy industry to the moon and Elon Musk's ambition to have "self-growing cities" there.
These are enticing visions, but are they attainable? The study is published in Frontiers in Space Technologies. We realized that we could make a first feasibility estimate simply by looking at how much power and water a large population would use on the moon, and how long a city of 100,000 or 1 million people could survive there.
How sustainable is a city on the moon? The good news is that power, even without nuclear reactors, is not a problem. That's because the rims of the craters containing the pits of eternal darkness are in almost permanent sunlight. (That's why they are sometimes, slightly incorrectly, referred to as the "peaks of eternal light.") Up on those highly illuminated rims, it would be possible to generate 3 gigawatts of electricity using kilometer-tall towers covered with photovoltaic arrays.
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