Since early 2020, a group called the Lunar Surface Innovation Consortium (LSIC, pronounced “ell-sick”) has been meeting regularly to discuss the infrastructure needed for any future presence on the Moon, from power to resource utilization. The companies, universities, and other organizations that are part of LSIC had been working to identify key technologies and development strategies, even as NASA’s plans to use any such infrastructure were vague, at best.
| Leadership, budgets, and technology, said Garcia-Galan, “have aligned with us being here today to frickin’ build a Moonbase.” |
At this spring’s LSIC meeting, split between downtown Washington and the Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, the mood was very different. A month earlier, NASA held its “Ignition” event where the agency not only declared its intent to develop a lunar base in lieu of the orbiting Gateway, but also committed spending tens of billions over the next decade to so do, with plans for dozens of lander missions, habitats, power systems, and more.
Those advocates of lunar base found themselves in the position of being, if anything, not ambitious enough about their visions of lunar bases. In opening remarks, Bobby Braun, head of APL’s space exploration sector, compared one illustration of a lunar base from those earlier efforts with the expansive vision NASA presented at Ignition.
“Our concept ended up being, I hate to admit this, small,” he said. “In hindsight, what were we thinking?”
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