Can the Moon’s Own Resources Support a Working Base?
Stevens professor and graduate student examine the logistical nuts, bolts and costs of humans living and working on the moon — using what’s already there
There’s renewed global interest in exploring, sampling, possibly even living and working on the moon for scientific or business purposes. At least three space agencies are currently planning near-future missions to Earth’s nearby companion.
But is it actually feasible to live or work there for any period of time, given the continuous needs for food, oxygen, water, materials and other basics that simply don’t exist on the lunar surface? Wouldn’t any mission, base or long-term project require constant (and expensive) shipments of fresh supplies from Earth?
Answers are emerging.
Stevens professor and space-systems expert Hao Chen believes the moon itself could supply many of the requisite resources and save the nation billions of dollars in the process — though such a plan would also require careful thinking about waste disposal.
With recent graduate (and visiting Fulbright scholar) Evangelia Gkaravela M.Eng. ‘25, Chen set out to quantify the costs of using mechanical, manufacturing and chemical technologies to extract raw materials from the moon; refine them; and use them for construction, assembly, operations and the critical generation of energy and water.
Unlocking water, oxygen, materials
Using native resources on a planet or moon as raw materials is known in NASA parlance as In-Situ Resource Utilization (or ISRU).
To conduct their analysis, Chen and Gkaravela studied a set of specific ISRU technologies that would likely be deployed on a lunar base:
Molten regolith electrolysis directly extracts oxygen and metals from lunar rocks and soils by heating them to very high temperatures of thousands of degrees Fahrenheit.
Heating breaks down metallic compounds in the rocks and soil, releasing breathable oxygen for storage and use by astronauts while also precipitating out useful metals such as iron, silicon, aluminum and titanium that can be used to build solar panels, shelters, vehicles and machinery. No chemical reagents are required.Soil/water extraction and direct-water electrolysis processes begin with either lunar ice or wetted minerals, extracting water through techniques including heated drills, evaporation and condensation.
Some of that water is stored and used, while some of it undergoes a second step of electrolysis to harvest the large quantities of hydrogen and oxygen present within water molecules.A NASA-designed pilot excavator known as IPEx, a powerful robotic system in development that digs and transports lunar rocks and soil, would be key to the effort of harvest and moving around raw materials.
A compact, working nuclear fission-powered system also currently in design and testing at NASA would provide power for those operations.
After making assumptions and calculating the various power budgets and costs of these technologies, Chen and Gkaravela compared the cost of using them over a three-year mission against the cost of continually fueling and ferrying resupply rockets back and forth from Earth as needed.
The result? The total mission costs of Earth-based operations were nearly triple that of comparable lunar-based operations: about $2.5 billion, versus about $750 million when leveraging ISRU systems for the specific long-term lunar mission scenarios the two researchers examined.
Sustainability concerns also noted
Chen and Gkaravela also discovered a caveat to producing materials on the moon, however: some operations also produce considerable waste in the form of toxic gases or solid waste residue.
At small scales, this isn’t much of an issue, but as a mission scales up in size (or stretches longer in time) it can become significant.
Their simulation found that, as productivity scaled above a planned original mission size, the oxygen, water and materials demands could significantly increase waste production of slag, unusable metals and atmospheric emissions.
“This is something planners always need to think very seriously about,” says Chen. “You can’t simply stow garbage on the moon indefinitely or bring it back to Earth without affecting systems, environments, human health.”
The duo’s research was first presented at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics’ (AIAA) 2025 SciTech Forum earlier this year.
What’s next? Gkaravela — who received Stevens’ Academic Excellence for Master Students in the Systems and Enterprises Department award and recently completed her master’s degree in Space Systems Engineering — has been accepted to a new role with the European Space Agency’s ESTEC technology development and testing facility in Noordwijk, The Netherlands.
Meanwhile, Chen and graduate researchers are also examining the important question of food generation systems in a separate study.
“For this paper, we focused on the water, oxygen and propellant side of a mission, on resource generation using ISRU,” points out Chen. “But it is definitely possible to produce food during space missions."
"We actually have another working project specifically focused on the growing and production of food in space — what we call an ‘interplanetary food supply chain.”
That work, by Chen and Stevens doctoral candidate Iser Pena, was recently accepted to the 2025 International Astronautical Congress. The conference will take place this fall in Sydney, Australia.