Before I talk about flags, programmes and schedules, I want to look soberly at the place itself. The Moon is not a small planet. It is a body with one eightieth of Earth's mass and one sixth of its gravity, without air, without a magnetic field, without a water cycle and without weather of any kind. What passes for an atmosphere at its surface is a vacuum better than anything an earthly laboratory produces. The average distance is 384,400 kilometres, three days of flight, 1.3 seconds for a radio signal.

Its axis stands almost upright, tilted by barely one and a half degrees. Nearly everything that makes the Moon difficult and interesting follows from that. There are no seasons, but there is a daily rhythm of 29.5 Earth days, roughly fourteen days of light and fourteen of darkness. In equatorial sunlight the ground climbs above 120 degrees Celsius and falls below minus 170 at night. On the floors of the polar craters, where the grazing sunlight has never reached in billions of years, the temperature sits near 40 kelvin, colder than Pluto. That is precisely why water ice has been able to survive there.

With no magnetic field and no atmosphere, cosmic radiation arrives unimpeded. A Chinese lander measured about 1.4 millisieverts per day on the far side, roughly two and a half times what crews absorb aboard the space station. Add solar outbursts that can deliver a life threatening dose within hours to anyone without a shelter. The only effective shielding is mass, which in practice means several metres of regolith piled over the habitat.

That regolith is the next problem. Because no wind and no water ever rounded it off, it consists of sharp edged glassy splinters, a considerable share of them smaller than twenty micrometres. It charges electrostatically, clings to everything, works its way into joints and seals, frosts visors and cripples radiator surfaces. The Apollo crews inhaled it and developed respiratory irritation within days. We are discussing stays of months.

And the Moon is less dead than it looks. The Apollo seismometers recorded shallow quakes up to magnitude 5.5 that lasted more than ten minutes, because dry rock without water does not damp the oscillation but rings like a bell. Add material fatigue from the temperature swing of every cycle, and the cold welding of bare metal surfaces in vacuum. None of this is unsolvable. But every single property of this body works against permanent presence.

The night that does not end

Of all these conditions, the night decides the most. Fourteen days without sun at minus 170 degrees cannot be bridged by batteries, certainly not for an inhabited station running heating, air processing and machinery. The mass required for storage on that scale breaks any transport budget. This is why the entire technical planning now converges on the same answer: a nuclear reactor on the surface.

The American side put this into a directive in August 2025, calling for at least 100 kilowatts of electrical power by the first quarter of 2030. A presidential order followed in December, an agreement between NASA and the Department of Energy in January 2026, and in April 2026 a White House science office initiative that inserts a smaller 20 kilowatt demonstrator ahead of it. On the other side, the Chinese and Russian project plans nuclear power as the basis of its station.

Now the part that appears in no press release. One hundred kilowatts equals the consumption of about seventy five American households. A plant that loosens ice from frozen regolith, cleans it and splits it into oxygen and hydrogen consumes that output on its own while running. Nothing remains for habitat, workshop, vehicle charging and communications. What is meant to arrive by 2030 is not a power station for a settlement. It is the first socket in a place that has none. Anyone speaking of cities on the Moon should set that figure beside the sentence.

A colony on resupply

The second quantity is the loop. The space station now recovers about 98 per cent of its water, a technical achievement worth respecting. Yet nothing closes with it. The nitrogen for the atmosphere comes entirely from Earth. The food comes entirely from Earth. Spare parts come entirely from Earth. The station is a place where people live, not a place that carries people.

On the Moon every delivered kilogramme costs a multiple of what it costs to low Earth orbit. The decisive figure for a settlement is therefore neither payload per flight nor landings per year. It is this: how many months does this place survive without any delivery at all. I call that supply depth. It is the only number that separates an outpost from a settlement, and it appears as a target value in none of the published architectures.

What suppresses that number today is dependence on single systems. The lunar variant of the largest available launcher needs a whole series of tanker flights in Earth orbit for each landing, and any delay in that chain moves the mission. A second provider traced a failure of its rocket this year to an engine problem. Europe's large cargo lander is not expected to fly regularly before the 2030s. A colony whose survival hangs on the order book and reliability of a single company is not a colony. It is an operation on resupply, and the delivery service can terminate.

I do, however, consider the word "colony" misapplied here. What can exist by the 2030s of this century is an outpost for humanity on resupply, and I do not say that to diminish what is being achieved. I say it because the wrong name attracts the wrong investment. Anyone who believes he is building a settlement economises on stores and on the ability to manufacture spare parts on site. Anyone who knows he is building an outpost plans in exactly the reserve that turns it into a settlement later.

The ejecta radius

The danger from space is usually misjudged. The chance that a person is struck directly by a meteoroid is so small it can be set aside. What is dangerous is the surroundings of an impact. On 17 March 2013 NASA's monitoring programme recorded the brightest flash ever measured on the lunar surface. The orbiter later found the crater: 18.8 metres across. What matters is what lay around it. More than two hundred secondary impact marks, scattered as far as thirty kilometres away.

The hazard zone of a moderate impact is therefore not the hole but a landscape. Without an atmosphere nothing slows down, nothing burns up, and the ejecta travels on ballistic arcs until it lands again. Add the constant bombardment by millimetre scale particles that fatigues seals, weakens suit fabric and degrades heat exchangers. The answer is the same as for radiation: mass above the habitat, which means building under the ground rather than on it.

The largest impact hazard on the surface, however, is self inflicted. A descending stage accelerates regolith to projectile speed across kilometres, because no air slows the particles. Apollo 12 effectively sandblasted the Surveyor probe 155 metres away, as later measurements of the returned components confirmed. This is why current American planning parks vehicles about two kilometres away during a landing. Under these conditions a prepared landing pad is not a convenience. It is the only measure that genuinely reduces this hazard.

Whoever dies there will probably die of something unspectacular. Of dust in lungs and mechanisms, of the accumulated dose over years, of a component that cracks after its thousandth thermal cycle, of appendicitis with no ride home. The slow pressure loss that nobody notices in time is more realistic than the meteorite.

The place that exists only once

Everything named so far converges on a single fact: the number of usable sites is tiny. What is needed is a combination found in very few places. An elevated ridge that, thanks to the minimal axial tilt, receives almost continuous sunlight, immediately beside a crater whose floor has lain in shadow for billions of years and therefore holds ice, and with it a clear line of sight to Earth for communications. At the south pole the best of these places add up to a few square kilometres. On the rim of Shackleton crater there are three points that together are lit for more than ninety per cent of the year, two of them eight kilometres apart.

Everyone is aiming at exactly this terrain. The Chinese precursor mission to survey the south pole targets the Shackleton rim, the candidate regions for the American landings lie in the same area, the follow-up mission on resource use comes at the end of the decade, and the planned Chinese and Russian station is to be built there in the 2030s. So this is not a wide continent where everyone can take a piece. It is ground the size of a city district that cannot be multiplied, and therefore exactly the kind of object for which I have described trusteeship in this series.

From that follows the real answer to whether every nation should build its own base. Spatially it cannot, not without endangering the others. Several installations on the same few kilometres sit inside each other's landing ejecta, inside each other's dust plumes and inside the radio shadow of the same ridges. Building side by side there is not a duplication of cost. It is mutual obstruction with a lethal outcome when something fails.

The radio shadow

The third constriction is the link home. The Moon is tidally locked, so its far side never sees Earth. There is no direct radio contact there, none at all. Anyone using the far side needs relay satellites. China already operates one on an orbit behind the Moon, Europe is planning its own constellation, and the American side a network of relay and navigation services.

The value of the far side lies in precisely that shadow. It is the only place in the inner solar system where Earth's radio noise is entirely absent, which makes it unique for radio astronomy. As a departure point for Mars it is no better than any other patch of ground. Whether a ship leaves from the near or the far side changes almost nothing in orbital mechanics. What makes a lunar departure attractive for Mars missions at all is propellant made from local water, and that lies in the dark craters of the poles.

At the pole itself, the link becomes the third selection criterion. From the ridges Earth stands low but almost permanently above the horizon, from the crater floors it is never visible. After light and after ice, the choice of site narrows once more. And even with the best line of sight, the travel time of about 1.3 seconds each way remains. For a conversation that is irrelevant. For remotely operating an excavator sliding down a slope it is the difference between intervening and watching.

What must be shared and what must not

These conditions produce a dividing line that comes not from a political principle but from the matter itself. Everything fixed in place, expensive, and lethal in failure belongs to a common substructure. That means power generation, relay and navigation services, prepared landing and launch zones, the propellant depot, rescue capability and the medical station. Everything mobile, replaceable and subject to competition can and should remain national or private. Laboratories, habitats, manufacturing, research, prestige.

We know the pattern from airports. Airlines compete hard, but none of them builds its own runway alongside, and air traffic control belongs to none of them. That holds not out of idealism but because the alternative would be unaffordable and unsafe. On terrain of a few square kilometres it holds twice over.

The warning comes from Antarctica. More than seventy stations from over thirty nations stand there, with considerable duplication, but with shared logistics and mutual obligation to rescue, because the terrain enforced it. The Moon will become this century's Antarctica, only without the option of flying someone out within hours. Whoever gets into trouble there has as their nearest help whatever stands within sight.

The substructure without an operator

There will be no shared base of all spacefaring nations. There are two blocs aiming at the same ridges, and on the American side the law prohibits direct cooperation with the Chinese programme. That is the starting point, not the outcome of a debate, and any proposal ignoring it is paper.

What is realistic is smaller and harder. An obligation to rescue, regardless of the flag of whoever needs it. Common connection standards for power, oxygen, water and data, so that foreign equipment can dock at all in an emergency. And an understanding of who sets down where, so that nobody sandblasts anybody else. That sounds modest, but it has workable precedents, from the docking of American and Soviet spacecraft in the middle of the Cold War to rescue at sea, which holds between hostile states as well, because the ocean takes no account of front lines.

What is missing is not a text. What is missing is someone to build and operate that substructure. Who erects the reactor that others may connect to, and at what price? Who maintains the landing zone both programmes use, and who is liable when a landing goes wrong? As long as these questions have no addressee, the substructure does not appear, and then everyone builds their own improvisation on the same few kilometres after all.

I do not expect this substructure to arise from insight. It will arise when the first emergency forces it, and then it will be improvised, expensive, and preceded by a death. I am aware of how that sounds. I have simply found no era in which infrastructure serving everyone was built before the damage rather than after it. The Moon would be the first chance to reverse that, because this time we know in advance what is coming.

Europe has an opportunity for this shortly. On 15 December its member states decide in Rome on the direction of their exploration programmes, after the American change of course left the existing European contributions without a purpose. On the table are the large cargo lander as a series and a dedicated relay and navigation constellation. Both are components of the substructure. Whoever supplies them builds. Whoever does not, rides along.

Which infrastructure on the Moon would you open to a rival in an emergency, which would you not, and what is to become of competition there when both sides stand on the same few square kilometres?

Website: https://planet-futures.org