{"id":626516,"date":"2026-09-16T14:54:18","date_gmt":"2026-09-16T14:54:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/626516\/"},"modified":"2026-09-16T14:54:18","modified_gmt":"2026-09-16T14:54:18","slug":"a-million-person-moon-city-could-run-out-of-water-in-just-over-a-century","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/626516\/","title":{"rendered":"A Million-Person Moon City Could Run Out of Water in Just Over a Century"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Credit: ZME Science. <\/p>\n

The discovery of water in dark craters at the Moon\u2019s poles has sparked a \u2018moon rush\u2019 to establish bases there, and then villages, cities, and heavy industry. How sustainable is this rush?<\/p>\n

Soon after the Moon was formed, asteroids bombarded it, creating its pockmarked topography. Near the Moon\u2019s poles, there are dozens of crater floors that have not seen direct sunlight in about four billion years. Many of these cryogenically cold \u2018pits of eternal darkness\u2019 are below a temperature of 110 K (-173.15 \u00b0C or -279.67 \u00b0F), forming \u2018cold traps\u2019 in which water ice won\u2019t sublimate away by more than a millimeter in a billion years, even in the vacuum at the Moon\u2019s surface. <\/p>\n

And there is water to freeze: some of those asteroids brought it along with them. Since 2013 we have known that water is still there, possibly as much as a billion tons of it, thanks to a succession of Moon-orbiting missions that have mapped out likely locations in increasing detail.<\/p>\n

The presence of water at the lunar poles changes everything about human visits to the Moon. Suddenly it is practical to envisage a \u2018Moon village\u2019 where people could survive without importing every last bit from Earth. They could grow their own food and have showers and functional toilets, unlike the astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS). <\/p>\n

This possibility has sparked ambitions from the likes of Jeff Bezos to move heavy industry to the Moon and Elon Musk\u2019s aims to have \u201cself-growing cities\u201d there. These are enticing visions, but are they attainable?<\/p>\n

The good news<\/p>\n

We realized that we could make a first feasibility estimate simply by looking at how much power and water a large population would use on the Moon, and how long a city of 100,000 or one million people could survive there. How sustainable is a city on the Moon?<\/p>\n

The good news is that power, even without nuclear reactors, is not a problem. That\u2019s because the rims of the craters containing the pits of eternal darkness are in almost permanent sunlight. (That\u2019s why they are sometimes, slightly incorrectly, referred to as the \u2018peaks of eternal light\u2019). <\/p>\n

Up on those highly illuminated rims, it would be possible to generate three gigawatts of electricity using kilometer-tall towers covered with photovoltaic arrays. It should be possible to manufacture solar panels on the Moon. There\u2019s certainly plenty of silicon. <\/p>\n

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This could even make AI data centers on the Moon possible, by placing them near these sunny peaks. That would be the start of a true lunar economy.<\/p>\n

The bad news<\/p>\n

The bad news is that, even assuming a generous one billion tons of water to start with, without recycling, the answer to our question of sustainability is that the city would last only a few years. Even in the best-case scenario, with 98% efficient recycling of water \u2014 the same as achieved on the ISS \u2014a one-million-person city will run out of water in just over a century. <\/p>\n

That is a problem for sustainable Moon settlement. And today\u2019s best estimates of the amount of water on the Moon are about 30 times less than a billion tons, shortening the time to water exhaustion by the same factor. <\/p>\n

This means that even a small city would run dry after just a decade or so. A Moon village with a thousand people, or even a town with 10,000 people, would instead be sustainable for several centuries or more.<\/p>\n

There are potential solutions. We could improve the efficiency of water recycling by a factor of five or more; lower water usage from new techniques such as vertical farming; import water, probably from accessible asteroids; or, simply, find more water. <\/p>\n

Of these, it may be this last hope that is most promising. Current water surveying techniques do not reach below the surface more than a few meters, while the rubble-like rocks of the surface regolith typically extend tens of meters down and may contain water in the cold traps. If the ambitious plans of the space billionaires are to be realized, then finding more water will be the first step.<\/p>\n

This article originally appeared in Frontiers<\/a>.<\/p>\n


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