Posted on 09/14/2026 9:39:55 AM PDT by BenLurkin
The discovery of water at the poles of the moon has inspired speculation about whether we can build there – cities, industrial neighborhoods, places where people work and live. But is there enough water, and can we use it efficiently enough?
The discovery of water in dark craters at the moon's poles has sparked a "moon rush" to establish bases there, and then villages, cities and heavy industry. How sustainable is this rush?
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The presence of water at the lunar poles changes everything about human visits to the moon. Suddenly it is practical to envisage a "moon village" where people could survive without importing every last bit from Earth. They could grow their own food and have showers and functional toilets...
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 — the same as achieved on the ISS — a one-million-person city will run out of water in just over a century. That is a problem for sustainable moon settlement. And today's 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. 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.
(Excerpt) Read more at space.com ...
Getting a bit ahead of ourselves, arent we? How about 20-100?
Besides, the weight of a million people might make the moon tip over and sink....
How about no protection from asteroids? Or hemorrhoids.
They could ship dehydrated water to the moon.
Never desired to live some place I cannot breathe without a suit or pressurized structure.
That’d be a catsasstrophe.
There’s also the thing with the solar winds, cosmic radiation, poison soil and barely any atmospheric pressure. You would have to spend 50 years sending thousands of robots first to build even the most basic infrastructure for human habitation. It would most likely have to be underground.
Excellent idea. It is very light, so getting it there shouldn’t take much fuel.
But musk has a BFR, he can just haul water up there. Easy peasy.
“... a one-million-person city will run out of water in just over a century.”
I doubt there will be a million people on the Moon ever............
So many assumptions with so little data to support them.
Sloppy.
Try a submarine.
In the series Space:1999 the moving Moon encountered a place in space where it could have regular, heavy rainfall. But the hero figures out and tells the science expert costar Barry Morse that all the quaint names for Mare this and Mare that for the “seas” in the huge craters would soon be filling up as actual seas and they’ll drown in the middle of a crater.
It’s actually quite easy because any moon habitation would necessarily be underground due to micrometeorites and cosmic radiation. Due to this, there’s very little waste of available water if water santization is done well and moisture traps pull ambient water from the sealed underground areas.
You could put a ship in low orbit with a tethered scoop to draw moisture from the upper atmosphere and then transport the collected water to the moon quite easily.
Let’s just see if we can set up a small colony before worrying about water sufficient for the millions.
There are asteroids in the asteroid belt that are mostly water. That might be easier than hauling Earth water, which by the way we Earthlings need.
How do we know there aren’t already cities on the moon?
Meh, they’ll just bring dehydrated water with them. I think Acme make it.
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