The US Fed.gov Wants to Grow a Lunar Economy

Ars Technica is reporting today that more than just NASA is interested in making the moon more available to industry.  

It appears to have started at NASA, which is using part of its work on Artemis to seek a lunar economy (pdf warning) that they're not the only customers for. That makes sense, because the more infrastructure that gets developed, the lower the costs can be for everyone that wants to use it.  It's as close to an "iron law" as it gets in manufacturing and production: the more you make, the lower the cost per item.  Typically, as quantity doubles, the price decreases by 25 to 35%.  

A whole host of conditions must be met for a lunar economy to thrive. There must be something there that can be sold, be it resources, a unique environment for scientific research, low-gravity manufacturing, tourism, or another source of value. Reliable transportation to the Moon must be available. And there needs to be a host of services, such as power and communications for machines and people on the lunar surface. So yeah, it's a lot.

Enter DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.  DARPA has a long track record of backing and funding new technologies going back decades - they even paid for the the first Falcon 1 launch. Last year, they announced a new study, called LunA-10, to understand how best to facilitate a thriving lunar economy by 2035. The program manager for the study is Major Michael "Orbit" Nayak. You've got to be serious when your nickname is Orbit.

In December, DARPA announced that it was working with 14 different companies under LunA-10, including major space players such as Northrop Grumman and SpaceX, as well as non-space firms such as Nokia. These companies are assessing how services such as power and communications could be established on the Moon, and they're due to provide a final report by June.

While the final report is due by June, Major Navak issued a preliminary report earlier this month 

"Based on technical work and development conducted under the LunA-10 study, I have identified six hypotheses where, if revolutionary improvements in technology can be made, I assess that a direct acceleration to the fielding of a lunar economy is likely to occur," Nayak said in the paper.

Last Thursday, based on the ideas elucidated in Nayak's paper, DARPA issued a "Request for Information" for technological capabilities that could scale up lunar exploration and commerce. This federal solicitation makes for interesting reading and suggests that Nayak and DARPA have thought things through.

A Request For Information or RFI is the very preliminary first step in the government procurement process.  The RFI is published where any interested contractor can read it and respond with an equally preliminary summary of how they think they can provide the solutions the RFI is asking about.  Neither the Fed.gov or the respondents are committing to anything.  They aren't paying the companies for the response and aren't committing to actually paying anyone for anything.  The companies aren't committing to produce whatever they respond about nor committing to a price. 

The six areas are: 

• Centralized heating and cooling: The moon has a day/night cycle that lasts 28 days which alternates between extremely hot and extremely cold. Could there be a centralized thermal system that provides cooling during the day and heating during the night?  Perhaps one that new industries could pay for like our electrical utilities?  
• Lunar prospecting:  What minerals are there on the moon that are close enough to the surface to be collected and what could be done with them? 
• Silicon wafer manufacturing: Remember Blue Origin's talk about manufacturing solar cells on the moon?  The cells they showed were small, perhaps 75mm (~3 inches) in diameter.  The emphasis here is >400 mm wafers (~15.75"). "Silicon crystal growth occurs at 1425 deg Celsius, which is approximately the temperature at which multiple ISRU pilot plants intend to operate, e.g., for carbothermal reduction of oxygen from regolith," the solicitation states.
• Microbial biomanufacturing:  Microorganisms are involved in many critical processes here on Earth (besides making wine and cheese).  The goal is to combine local materials, such as lunar regolith, with biotechnology to create structures, industrial fuels, or lubricants.
• Low-gravity resource extraction: There appears to be a lot of valuable minerals on the moon, but they seem to be in low concentrations.  DARPA seeks proposals on how to deal with that. 
• A lunar GPS system. A real lunar GPS constellation is probably out of the question, but with a handful of settlements clustered in areas of high resource availability, some way of distributing time signals other than getting them from the Earth seems to be useful. 
  

While it's early to jump to conclusions, DARPA has the reputation, the "chops", to attract serious interest. Another thing to bear in mind is that while DARPA's budget for 2023 was $4.1 Billion; NASA's budget was more than six times that, $25.3 Billion.  Perhaps DARPA could fund some things that are harder to justify for NASA, but they're not going to make a major contribution to NASA's budget.

A map of the area near the south pole where the IM-1 lander was headed, coded for elevations: blue are lowest through greens and reds to the highest in brown and then gray at Mons Mouton, bottom left.  Areas like this with craters in perma-shadows are of interest for the resources they might harbor. Image credit, Intuitive Machines.