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By the 2040s, the Moon is bustling with international research and commercial infrastructure, transforming its barren surface into a livable ecosystem. At the heart of this thriving community lies the Artemis Base Camp at the lunar south pole, equipped with landing pads, refueling stations, habitats, and resource facilities. Here, water-ice mined from the Moon's surface becomes a game-changer, supplying water, breathable air, radiation shielding, and essential propellants for space travel.
This lunar infrastructure not only supports sustainable living on the Moon but also serves as a launchpad for Mars missions, reducing dependency on Earth and making space exploration more cost-effective and sustainable. The Moon stands as a beacon of human potential and innovation, showing us what's possible when we look beyond our Earthly cradle.
But what would a day living and working on the Moon really look like?
Lockheed Martin invites you to step into this future with a unique story -- a novella that immerses you in the life of a commercial lunar contractor. Journey through a full day on the Moon, from kicking the tires of your rover to exploring the construction site of a lunar megaproject. Read an excerpt below to experience a sustainable lunar presence, decades into the future.
Your Lunar Journey Begins
Settling back into the driver's seat, you punch in the final coordinates into the display. The electric motor hums quietly to life and you're off again. The stark black and white vistas of the lunar surface roll quietly by as your rover ferries you to the last site on the list.
These moments of rest between service locations are a well-earned reprieve. You've got a busy job as one of just a few dozen humans keeping the whole Moon running. By the 2040s, there is a thriving international community on Earth's nearest celestial neighbor. This is because the Moon is the perfect testing ground and resource hub to support humanity's expansion into the solar system.
Here, groundbreaking science furthers the pursuit of knowledge and promises answers to the most fundamental questions, like who we are, where we came from, and what might be in store. The Moon's alien beauty masks a hostile environment of harsh radiation, vacuum, extreme temperatures, and abrasive dust. It turns out that the life-or-death challenge of lunar survival makes our nearest celestial neighbor an excellent environment to test out hardware and procedures for Mars, an even more challenging, remote, and unforgiving destination.
A Growing Lunar Community
The Moon is an important source of material wealth outside Earth's gravity well. Here, we can develop the resources we need to operate in deep space more sustainably, helping us break free from the long and expensive logistics train of Earth launch. We have even reached the point where lunar resource development is beginning to flow value back to Earth orbit. For all these reasons, it's only natural that there exists a growing community here as humanity takes its first steps out of its Earthly cradle.
Your fellow lunar travelers are a diverse bunch. Many are scientist-astronauts from the world's various space agencies. Intelligent, highly trained, and level-headed, they are out on the frontier performing trailblazing science. There are also commercial contractors like you, working for companies that provide and maintain cutting edge infrastructure that enable those science missions and other, more routine lunar operations.
You work for Aquarius, one of the logistics support companies that keep the Moon's infrastructure humming. Its customers comprise organizations across every segment of lunar activity: in-space transportation, communications, navigation, surface mobility, habitation, power, resource production and distribution, and construction. These systems help turn the barren surface into a more hospitable ecosystem. It's your responsibility to know each piece of this infrastructure backwards and forwards: how it works, how it can break, and how to fix it if it does. And boy, is there a lot of infrastructure.
Welcome to Artemis Base Camp
By far the busiest hub remains the lunar south pole. You remember the view from the lander when you arrived, burning its way down the long arc of the landing trajectory. How the blackness of space gave way to a blinding white horizon as the lander leveled out and the south polar surface raced up to meet you.
There, spread out in all its glory, was the triumphal sprawl of the Artemis Base Camp...