Ref. Text.01: SimCity the Moon

What the first ten years of lunar settlement actually need

A speculative reference text accompanying Das Terre. Written October 2026; every date and figure below reflects public reporting as of that month.

You can’t zone the Moon

SimCity begins with zoning: you paint the map residential, commercial or industrial, and the city fills in. The Moon doesn’t allow that first move. Article II of the Outer Space Treaty forbids national appropriation, so no government can claim a single acre. Book 8 of Das Terre spends four chapters on what that leaves: you can license use but not own ground, and a license held long enough starts to work like a deed.

So a lunar city doesn’t start from a zoning map. It starts from a list of what keeps people alive and a set of rules for sharing scarce sites. This essay works through that list in roughly the order a builder would face it. It assumes the first ten years run from the first crewed landing of this era, which NASA now targets for 2028 on Artemis IV, to about 2038. It follows the method of the book’s Epilogue: ranges instead of single numbers, and flags where confidence is low.

Where things stand in fall 2026

The past year changed the picture a lot:

Artemis II flew in April. Four astronauts flew around the Moon and came home in nine days.
Artemis III is no longer a landing. NASA turned it into an Earth-orbit docking test of the commercial landers. The landing moved to Artemis IV, targeted for 2028.
NASA paused Gateway, the planned lunar-orbit station, and redirected effort toward a surface base.
NASA announced a Moon Base program in May: hardware delivered before the first landing; a power grid and permanent infrastructure from 2029 into the early 2030s; permanent habitats in the 2030s.
A fission reactor is a national target. The White House’s April 2026 space nuclear initiative directs NASA to have a lunar reactor ready to launch by 2030. Earlier requirements describe it as a 100-kilowatt-electric unit.

China’s program is on a parallel track. A crewed landing is targeted for 2030 using the Mengzhou spacecraft and the Lanyue lander. The International Lunar Research Station, built with Russia and other partners, is planned as a basic south-polar station by 2035. Chang’e-7 was to land near Shackleton crater this August to search for water ice. China postponed it on August 23, said only that it “did not meet the conditions required for launch,” and has announced no new date. Schedules slip on both sides, and any ten-year plan should assume that.

Both programs are heading for the same few square kilometers near Shackleton crater. Everything below follows from that.

1. Landing pads and roads

The first public works project is somewhere to land. A rocket plume striking loose regolith throws dust and pebbles outward at very high speed, and with no air to slow them they travel a long way. In 1969, Apollo 12 landed less than two hundred meters from the Surveyor 3 probe, and the probe came back to Earth sandblasted.

Once two or three landings a year become routine, unprepared ground is a hazard to everyone nearby. Researchers are working on sintered or paved pads made by heating regolith into a hard surface, and on modeling how plumes interact with prepared surfaces.

The Das Terre connection. A landing pad is shared infrastructure that pushes hazards onto its neighbors. That is the Coordination Line problem from Chapter 42: deciding who may land when, and where the debris falls, is an allocation of a scarce resource, not just a technical standard. NASA’s plan makes this concrete. Drones called MoonFall would mark a base perimeter spread over hundreds of square miles. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said the drones are meant to respect other nations’ equipment and that he expects the same in return. That is a promise to respect neighbors, not a rule. The Artemis Accords, now signed by 76 countries, allow “safety zones” around operations. Book 8’s Sovereignty Ceiling was built for exactly this risk: a safety zone held long enough becomes a border that nobody voted on.

2. Power

Solar power at the poles is good but has gaps. Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter data shows that some points on the Shackleton rim and connecting ridge are sunlit about 80 to 94 percent of the year. Two ridge points about 8 kilometers apart are rarely dark at the same time. No point is lit year-round. The longest stretch when all three candidate Shackleton outpost sites are in darkness is about 43 hours, so power for that long has to come from batteries or another source. Away from the poles, the lunar night lasts about two Earth weeks, which solar plus batteries cannot cover affordably at settlement scale.

That is why the fission reactor matters. A 100-kilowatt-electric reactor would power a small outpost: life support, ice extraction and a modest workshop. It would not power a town. My estimate is that the first decade needs a grid built from:

solar towers on the illuminated ridges;
one fission unit, possibly two late in the decade;
energy storage sized to cover the 43-hour gap;
cables or power-beaming between sites.

Phase 2 of NASA’s plan names a power grid explicitly.

The Das Terre connection. The best-lit ridge points are probably the scarcest resource on the Moon. There are only a handful of them, and whoever puts the first solar tower on one effectively controls it. That is the 1862 Homestead Act problem again: first arrival wins. The celestial grant from Chapter 25 was built for it. Part of the access is auctioned, part is set aside for applicants who could never win an auction, including the cooperative of technicians from that chapter, and part goes into a fund. If the peaks are handed out first-come, first-served, the next century will be fought over them.

3. Communications, navigation and time

Settlers need to talk to Earth, know where they are, and agree on what time it is. NASA and ESA are building LunaNet, an interoperable network that commercial and international providers could plug into.

Time is a real infrastructure problem. Because of relativity, a clock on Earth appears to an observer on the Moon to lose about 58.7 microseconds per day. That is negligible for human schedules but large enough to break precision navigation. The White House directed NASA in April 2024 to deliver a strategy for Coordinated Lunar Time by the end of 2026, probably built on a network of atomic clocks on the surface.

The Das Terre connection. Chapter 44’s Synthesis Floor fits this directly. Two programs working at the same pole may each bring their own maps and their own time standards. The registry should publish both and reconcile them case by case, rather than letting whoever arrived first declare its system the official one. That is the Galileo row from Chapter 44’s table, applied to a coordinate system.

Rest scheduling has the same issue. At the pole the Sun circles the horizon instead of rising and setting, so “Sunday” means nothing on its own. Chapter 43’s Rest Floor applies from the first permanent shift: rest is guaranteed, which day it falls on is left to each tradition, and a crew’s working week is measured in Coordinated Lunar Time.

4. Shelter and radiation

Chang’e-4’s dosimeter measured about 60 microsieverts per hour on the lunar surface. That is roughly 1.4 millisieverts a day, about 200 times the dose at Earth’s surface and more than twice the dose on the International Space Station. Each day outside shielding gives a person about half a year of normal Earth background radiation.

Landings and short stays can work from a lander or rover cabin. Long stays need mass overhead, and the cheapest mass on the Moon is the ground itself. The likely progression over the first decade:

Inflatable or rigid habitat modules delivered from Earth.
Those modules covered with bagged or bermed regolith.
Structures built from bricks made of lunar soil. China plans to test regolith 3D printing on Chang’e-8, around 2028.

Lava tubes are an attractive later option, but they are far from the pole and its ice.

5. Water, oxygen and fuel

Settlement becomes economically possible here. Permanently shadowed craters near the pole hold water ice. Mining it supplies:

drinking water;
oxygen to breathe;
hydrogen and oxygen for rocket propellant.

Lunar regolith itself is roughly 40 to 45 percent oxygen by mass, locked in minerals. Several processes to extract it are in active development, including solar carbothermal reduction and the German Mini-ROXY process. None has produced oxygen on the Moon yet.

My estimate is that the first decade gets pilot plants, not industrial production. In the early years, nearly every kilogram of water and food still arrives from Earth.

The Das Terre connection. Ice is a common-pool resource in the strict sense of Ostrom’s Governing the Commons (cited in Chapter 41): finite and shared. Overdraw in one crater lowers what neighbors can expect to find. Chapter 40’s Search Floor matters less here than on Ganymede. COSPAR treats the Moon as a low contamination concern, though polar landings carry extra reporting duties because the ice is a scientific record. The heavier constraint is Chapter 39’s Attainability Floor: a mining license should not be renewable forever by someone who never actually reaches the ice.

6. Food, and the commune question

Plants can grow in lunar soil, but they struggle in it. In 2022, University of Florida researchers grew Arabidopsis in Apollo samples. Every seed sprouted, but the plants were stunted and showed stress responses, and those grown in Apollo 11 soil did worst. Regolith farming is a research program for the end of the first decade, not a food supply. Early food comes from Earth plus hydroponic greenhouses inside the habitat.

This is where the old question of land redistribution and agricultural communes lands on the Moon. On Earth, collective farming is a political choice, and the twentieth century showed how badly a forced version can go. On the Moon, collective life is a physical fact. Nobody owns their own air. Volume One already anticipated this: a person may hold “a habitat share whose value depends upon collective life support that no individual can possess alone.”

So a lunar settlement starts as a commune whether or not anyone intends it. On Earth, what separates a cooperative from the 1958 People’s Communes is whether the commune can be dissolved by its own members. On the Moon that becomes whether a member can leave. Chapter 26’s egress guarantee answers it: a seat home must always be available. That is the Moon’s version of the freedom Xiaogang’s eighteen households claimed in 1978 when they secretly divided their commune’s land. In my judgment, a settlement that cannot guarantee a return seat should not be licensed to hold people at all.

7. Medicine, dust and maintenance

Lunar dust is sharp, clings electrostatically and wears out seals, joints and lungs. Apollo crews felt it within days. Over a decade, maintenance becomes the main daily work: replacing seals, cleaning filters, repairing rovers.

That makes the early workforce largely robotic or teleoperated from Earth. The Moon is only about 1.3 light-seconds away, so an operator on Earth can drive a robot body in near real time. This is the first place the Embodiment Doctrine from Chapter 37 becomes routine labor. Someone in Houston or Hefei working a remotely operated body on the Moon is the “chassis” category from Book 9, ten years before anyone lives there full time.

The same short distance cuts against giving artificial systems on the Moon broad independence. Book 7’s argument for letting Overminds act on their own rested on distances too great for Earth to check their decisions in time. At 1.3 seconds, Earth can check, so the justification for autonomy is weak.

8. The infrastructure nobody puts in a press release

A settlement can have pads, power, ice and greenhouses and still fail if it lacks four things that aren’t hardware:

A shared registry of claims, safety zones and surveys. This is the Synthesis Floor from Chapter 44.
A grievance intake that works without the operator’s permission. This is Chapter 26.
A fund that collects part of the value of the scarce sites. This is the celestial grant from Chapter 25.
A standing review of all of the above. This is Chapter 45.

None of these appears in either the NASA or the Chinese roadmap. In my judgment, that gap is the biggest risk of the decade.

A ten-year build order

The years are speculative and should be read with the Epilogue’s warning about Ehrlich’s confident forecast of mass famine:

Years 1–3 (about 2028–2031). Robotic precursors, rovers and perimeter drones arrive. The first two-astronaut landings happen. A prepared landing pad is built. The first fission unit launches around 2030.
Years 4–6 (about 2031–2034). A grid links the ridge solar towers to the reactor. The first habitat is covered with regolith. Pilot plants extract water and oxygen. Crew stays stretch to weeks.
Years 7–10 (about 2034–2038). If the schedules hold, there is continuous or near-continuous presence. China’s research station reaches basic operation around 2035. Regolith bricks are in use and regolith farming experiments begin. The first serious disputes arise over ridge sites and ice.

At the end of the first decade, I expect a few dozen people living at two or three neighboring outposts near Shackleton, with a few hundred robots doing much of the work. Whether those outposts are cooperating neighbors or rivals with drone fences between them depends less on engineering than on whether the rules in section 8 exist before the first ridge dispute. Das Terre‘s case is that the rules have to be in place before that dispute arrives.

Sources

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