How to Build on the Moon

Overview

This paper lays out a sequencing framework for lunar surface construction: what has to happen before a crew can occupy a habitat, and in what order, given the constraints of regolith, vacuum, thermal cycling and limited launch mass.

Why sequencing is the hard problem

Most public discussion of lunar construction focuses on individual technologies: regolith sintering, inflatable structures, printed shielding. Less attention goes to the order these steps have to happen in, and what has to be true on site before each step is possible.

A sintered regolith shell is only useful once you have power, and stable power is only useful once you have a landing zone clear of dust contamination risk. Sequencing, not any single technology, decides whether a habitat plan is buildable with the mass and crew time available.

A four-phase framework

We group lunar construction into four phases, each with its own success criteria before the next can begin.

Where most plans break down

In reviewing publicly available lunar base concepts, the most common failure point is not a missing technology. It is an implicit assumption that a later phase's resources will already be available when an earlier phase needs them.

Power budgets in particular tend to be sized for steady-state habitation rather than for the construction phase itself, which is more power hungry and less forgiving of downtime.

This is urban planning, not architecture

Sequencing is a planning problem before it is a building problem. The questions it asks are the ones a city planner asks: where does the ground get prepared, what runs underneath, what gets built first and what can only follow, and which decisions foreclose options twenty years out.

Three planning habits carry across directly. Infrastructure before buildings, because the cost of retrofitting power, thermal and waste lines into an occupied settlement is higher everywhere, and on the Moon it is paid in crew hours and EVA risk. Zoning by nuisance, keeping dust, noise and heat away from where people sleep. And leaving room to grow, because a first habitat placed to suit itself can block the second one.

The unit of design is the settlement, not the module. A base is a small town with one employer, a fixed population and no hinterland, and every decision about what to build first is also a decision about what kind of place it becomes.

What Siberia already taught us

The closest terrestrial precedent is not a research station. It is the settlement of Siberia: hundreds of towns built far from supply, in a climate that kills, around a single reason for being there.

The sequencing lesson is the same one. Heat and power came first and everything else was arranged around them, because a building without heat in January is not shelter. Logistics ran on a season rather than a schedule, so what could not be delivered in the window had to be produced locally or done without. And a town built around one resource lived or died with it, which is the risk any base built around a single mission inherits.

Our founder grew up in Siberia, where survival and shelter were never abstractions. That is not a metaphor we reach for on the way to the Moon. It is the reason this paper is about order and dependency rather than about materials.

Scoring what gets built

Sequencing says what order to build in. It does not say whether the thing being built is good enough. For that we use the Settlement Fitness Function, a model that began in 2018 as part of a graduate thesis on Mars settlement systems and was rebuilt as an interactive tool in 2025.

The fitness function scores a habitat the way a design review does: not by its best system, but by whether every system clears the bar that keeps a crew alive. Air, water, food, power, thermal control, radiation protection, waste and crew health are each scored on their own, and a domain below its threshold pulls the whole score down whatever the strengths elsewhere.

The difference between the two is time. The fitness function evaluates a finished settlement, a steady state. The sequencing framework asks what has to be true on site before that state can exist, and in what order, which is where power budgets sized for habitation rather than for construction come apart. Run together they ask the full question: is this buildable, and once built, does it hold.

Why a lunar habitat is not a station

Designing for the surface is a different discipline from designing for orbit. In weightlessness the direction of up barely matters. As I put it to BBC Science Focus: “There are no walls or floors, just surfaces,” and the table and equipment can be positioned anywhere.

A sixth of a gravity is enough to bring back floors, ceilings, dust that settles, and loads that have to go somewhere. It also brings back the things that make settlements on Earth hard: ground to prepare, utilities to route, and a site that has to work for the second building as well as the first.

The race to establish the first Moon base, BBC Science Focus →

What this means for near-term planning

A sequencing-first approach changes what gets prioritized in the next decade of lunar hardware development. Robotic site preparation and utility deployment that can run unattended for months, ahead of any crewed mission, matters more than headline shell-construction technology that has nowhere to attach until the earlier phases are solved.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Niki Werkheiser and Grant Anderson for the conversations that shaped the thinking in this paper. Their combined experience across NASA technology maturation and life support systems sharpened the sequencing framework considerably. Any remaining gaps are ours alone.