Mission

Why the success of the first lunar base is decided on the ground.

Humanity is going back to the Moon, and this time it is not about footprints but about a station that stays.Europe and the United States are building it this decade at the lunar south pole.It is the first step towards life on more than one world: bases on site, on the Moon, on Mars and on every body where people mean to stay.Each of them begins with the ground.

The problem starts after landing

Every rocket, every lander, every station module is built on Earth and flown to the Moon. The ground it all has to stand on is not. It lies there as it has for billions of years: unsurveyed, uneven, and bombarded at every landing by stirred-up dust and rock that, with no atmosphere, reaches the speed of a bullet.

At every landing, dust and rock shoot flat across the ground. With no atmosphere, nothing slows them down.

A lunar base needs a level landing pad and protective walls, plus trenches, foundations and cover against radiation. For a single minimal base, 2,600 to 15,000 tonnes of ground have to be moved before the first module is usable.

One flight of the European lander Argonaut brings 1.5 tonnes of payload to the Moon.

A single minimal base needs 2,600 to 15,000 tonnes of moved ground.

And every kilogram landed costs around 1.2 million dollars.

What a base needs, against what one flight brings

One flight: payload of the European lander Argonaut, 1,500 kg (source: ESA). One base: 2,600 to 15,000 tonnes of moved ground, range from the literature. Logarithmic scale, every tick is ten times the last.

On Earth such tasks are done by construction machines and the people who operate them. On the Moon there is nobody, and shipping a terrestrial machine does not work: every kilogram landed costs around 1.2 million dollars, and a machine that needs its own weight as a tool loses, at a sixth of the gravity, exactly what makes it useful.

The gap nobody fills

NASA lists moving lunar ground in the highest priority class of its open technology gaps. Europe has a lander in development, Argonaut, but no machine that works the ground at the destination. Payloads for the first missions are being assigned now, years before the flight.

That is the gap Terranova is built in.

Whoever has the machines when the base gets built helps build the infrastructure of every mission after it.

What we believe

Groundwork is the layer underneath everything else.

Reactor, oxygen plant, station module, landing pad: all of it stands on ground somebody surveyed and moved first. That layer is needed before anything else works, and so far nobody delivers it.

It should come from Europe.

If it is not delivered by a European company, an American provider will deliver it, and every European surface mission will depend on that.

The Moon is only the beginning.

Every permanent settlement starts with the same work. We build for the Moon today because missions there can be planned and flown. The same machines later prepare the ground where people are meant to live for good.

The machines The team