Why it matters
Making a place to stay.
Regolith is abrasive, electrostatically charged and gets into everything. Radiation is unshielded. Landings throw debris at ballistic speeds. A permanent presence needs pads, roads, shelter and shielding, and most of it will have to be built from what is already there.
Surface infrastructure is where an operator's perspective matters most. It is civil engineering under the harshest conditions humans have attempted.
What infrastructure has to work before everything else can happen?
Inside this layer
6 building blocks
Landing pads
Stabilized pads that contain plume ejecta and protect nearby assets from every subsequent landing.
Roads
Graded and stabilized routes that let rovers move faster and cleaner between sites.
Habitats
Pressurized volume for crews, from delivered modules to structures built or buried in place.
Shielding
Protection from radiation, micrometeoroids and thermal extremes, often using regolith as the material.
Construction
Robotic and additive construction methods that use local material and minimal delivered mass.
Dust mitigation
Coatings, seals, electrostatic tools and operating practices that keep regolith out of machines and lungs.
Connect the stack
Dependencies
Rather than evaluating companies in isolation, we look for dependencies between infrastructure layers, and ask what must exist before the next layer can scale.
This layer depends on
This layer enables
Across every layer
Questions we are watching
Open questions
- Which site-preparation capabilities have to exist before permanent hardware can be landed safely?
- Who builds the first shared pad or road, and who pays for it?
- How do construction methods that work in a lab translate to unprepared terrain?