> <i>Current space hardware development costs range from $100,000/kg for basic, boring LEO hardware up to >$1m/kg for deep space robots such as the Mars Science Laboratory rover. A 50 T lunar power system would then cost between $5b and $50b</i><p>This assumption seems highly dubious. Nearly all of that 50T will be solar panels and batteries that only need to be designed once, meaning the development costs will scale sub-linearly.
Good but it should probably be mentioned that solar power production and transmission from geostationary orbit (where the sunlight is nearly constant) would work better and have the same positional advantage. Costs have to be considered, of course.<p>I still kinda like the idea of dropping a few nukes on crater rims at one of the poles to reduce the height necessary to get to perpetual sunlight though.
How infeasible would it be to deploy an HVDC cable that actually connects opposite sides of the moon and sidesteps most of the storage issue? The longest one on earth is 2500km so it seems within the realm.<p>You could hypothetically split the conductors east/west, eliminating the need for most insulation. Conductors could potentially be deployed from space and stitched together with robots or something.
Well, in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, they had a bit of a revolution on the moon and started throwing rocks. Having the power generators situated on earth would keep that scenario at bay.
I'm not an expert or anything, but is this making the assumption that there is 0 loss? You put 1Kw into a microwave transmitter on earth and expect to get 1Kw out of the receiver on the moon?<p>That's preposterous - I would be surprised if you get more than 5% of the power considering the losses in the transmitter, receiver (and related circuitry), not to mention the atmosphere itself plus whatever little bits get in the way (like, I don't know, the thousands of Starlink satellites and other space junk).
Come to think of it, the tidally locked orbit kind of makes such a supply seem obvious, doesn't it? I mean it's like a big fat "send power here" sign.
What about storing solar thermal for in situ resource utilization :
<a href="https://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Preparing_for_the_Future/Discovery_and_Preparation/Powering_the_future_with_lunar_soil" rel="nofollow">https://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Preparing_for_the_Futur...</a>
This is one of those late-night-dorm-conversation topics that is fun but pretty much hypothetical. We will not have any bases on the moon for a long, long time. We can't even manage powering our society here on earth.