The Cost of a Person-Year on the Moon
What does it cost to keep one person living on the Moon for a year, and what would bring that cost down by an order of magnitude?
Chapter summary
Setcoin's person-year model adds four costs: crew transport (seats × rotations), resupply (shipped kilograms × delivery price), the base itself (habitats, power and equipment spread over their life and over the crew) and ground operations.
Key takeaways
- 1
For an early four-person base with $300 million seats, six-month rotations, 90% recycling, $50,000 per kilogram delivery, a $10 billion base over 15 years and $500 million a year of ground operations, a person-year costs about $980 million; two-thirds of it is crew transport.
- 2
An eight-person base in the mid-2030s with $150 million seats and $10,000 per kilogram costs about $540 million.
- 3
A hundred-person settlement with $20 million seats, two-year stays, 98% recycling and $2,000 per kilogram delivery costs about $40 million per person-year.
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