Lunar Steel
When delivering anything from Earth into space, two questions dominate every decision: how much does it weigh, and can the Earth live without it? Lunar Steel begins with a simple truth: steel is extraordinarily heavy. With current precision landing costs at one to two million dollars per delivered kilogram, importing steel for lunar infrastructure is prohibitively expensive. Without the structural capabilities of steel, lunar superstructures become volume inefficient and systemically fragile. Geometry teaches that larger volumes require proportionally less surface area, but those larger volumes demand stronger materials.
Project Crucible delivers the resources required to create Lunar Steel on the Moon. This enables Lunar Steel to become the primary means of creating the infrastructure required for everything that follows. Lunar Steel is not a delivery of steel from Earth. It is a delivery of the Foundry Lander, the Workshop Lander, and companion rovers, which automate mission area processing, Lunar Steel production, and the construction of functional infrastructures.
These landers and rovers represent the first major irreversible commitment by Gravity Grains to a mission area on the Moon. Project Crucible has already seeded and characterized the site to the extent required to greenlight Lunar Steel. Lunar Steel now anchors, scaffolds, and traverses the mission area to develop the infrastructure and superstructure that follow.
Why Steel Matters
Gravity Grains is a space agriculture company. Without a contained habitat on the Moon, there is no habitat at all. Without sufficient shell thickness to protect against cosmic radiation, long-term survival on the Moon is impossible. Without the infrastructure provided by Lunar Steel, permanent settlement on the Moon is foundationally impractical. There is a reason skyscrapers and rail lines are not built from ceramics. Native ISRU materials such as silica ferrous regolith are ceramic in nature. Lunar Steel sets in motion the first wheels of lunar industry. It establishes the foundation required for Space Agriculture.
The LDAU is a massive structure. At seventy-five meters in diameter and one hundred twenty meters in length, it exceeds super heavy launch capabilities by an order of magnitude in volume alone. It cannot be built without Lunar Steel.
The elevated lunar rail system is even larger. At hundreds of kilometers in length, building even a single kilometer of elevated rail through Earth-delivered steel would be unfathomably expensive. Lunar Steel is the only viable option.
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
Although the term is usually associated with cloud computing, Lunar Steel and Project Waypoint function as an infrastructure service built on top of Project Crucible, providing the structures required for every subsequent mission phase. Whether building the LDAU, a Lunar Water facility, a railway, or any other major installation, Lunar Steel anchors and establishes the foundation on which that system is built.
Mission Profile
- The Foundry lander, Workshop lander, and four companion rover landers require six launches in total. They each rendezvous and dock with a Crucible Calyx equipped with two side-boosters and prepare for trans-lunar injection. Additional Crucible tanker launches may be required depending on launch-provider performance.
- The landers remain inert until the Calyx delivers them into the correct orbital plane around the Moon.
- The landers undock and perform their precision descent burn to the mission area.
- Day operations. The companion rovers perform horizontal processing of the mission area. The Foundry and Workshop landers charge. The Workshop Lander performs assembly tasks when components are ready.
- Night operations. All rovers return to dock for recharging and safety. The Workshop Lander stows. The Foundry enters full operations and routes excess heat to the docks to maintain thermal stability.
- The Foundry and Workshop traverse the infrastructure as it is built, using the emerging infrastructure to move horizontally and vertically throughout construction.
- The Foundry and Workshop Landers can transition to new interconnected infrastructure projects or retire as crane platforms on the completed architecture.
- The companion rovers transition to road development and pile maintenance duties in the immediate area. They are not capable of long-haul traversal and must return to dock during lunar night.
ISRU Advantage
Traditional lunar resource development requires precision landing, descent fuel, landing gear, hazard detection, and robotic oversight. These are unavoidable when committing to a lunar infrastructure project.
Lunar Steel maximizes its success by leveraging Project Crucible to precondition the mission area and by using the impact signatures as navigational markers. These foreign objects are unique and highly visible. After landing, they are processed and relocated, exchanging their guidance utility for material utility. The landers then become strong and distinct signals for future landing operations.
In total, only six landers are deployed. If they carried Earth steel, they would deliver less than thirty metric tons for a project that requires tens of thousands. By leveraging ISRU, Lunar Steel converts thirty metric tons of delivered capability into the tens of thousands of tons required.
Risk Management
Lunar Steel, specifically the Foundry lander, reaches and sustains steel creation temperatures. These temperatures have never been reached at high volume in any crew mission. Heavy construction yard behavior is inherently dangerous. There is no life support for crew, no emergency capability, and no escape option. For these reasons, Lunar Steel is fully autonomous and observed remotely.
The landers and rovers work in concert to provide triangulated metrics that keep infrastructure development on track, as the platforms are mobile only through the structures they create. Any failed lander or rover can be replaced without loss of mission and without risk to human life. Lost assets can be recycled or repurposed by later missions.
Cost Logic
Creating Lunar Steel requires roughly five percent carbon from Project Crucible. Every ton of carbon delivered supports the creation of twenty tons of Lunar Steel. Equally important, those twenty tons of Lunar Steel are produced in the form factor required for the infrastructure project rather than constrained by transport dimensions.
One of the side boosters used during the launch of Lunar Steel delivers enough carbon to offset thirty tons of Lunar Steel, equal to the entire mission weight of the Lunar Steel landers. In addition to that booster, eleven more are delivered, and six Calyx segments now reside in lunar orbit, forming the initial infrastructure core of Project Waypoint.
Leveraging Project Crucible’s architecture, Lunar Steel delivers three hundred sixty tons of Lunar Steel, the platforms to use it, the rovers that support it, and the beginning of a large orbital station, for roughly the same cost as sending thirty tons of Earth steel.
Where This Leads
Lunar Steel is the next foundational step toward the LDAU, Lunar Water, Lunar Logistics, and Waypoint. These disciplines are essential for Lunar Soil, the space agriculture that follows, and the beginning of Project Waypoint.
It is impossible to overstate the importance of Lunar Steel in becoming a spacefaring civilization.
Detailed pages will be introduced over time as we continue to develop Lunar Steel and create public documents for our community.