Astronomers Elvis and McDowell: lunar cities would run out of water within a century
A new feasibility study finds even the best-case lunar water reserves can't sustain a million-person Moon city long-term, despite ample solar power.
What to know
- A Frontiers in Space Technologies editorial by Martin Elvis and Jonathan McDowell models the sustainability of a lunar city using known polar water ice reserves.
- Even with 98% water recycling efficiency (the ISS standard) and generous water estimates of up to a billion tons, a million-person city would exhaust its water in just over 100 years; without recycling, only a few years.
- Power is not the limiting factor: kilometer-tall solar towers on permanently sunlit crater rims ('peaks of eternal light') could generate three gigawatts, potentially even supporting lunar AI data centers.
- The findings temper ambitions like Jeff Bezos's plans for lunar heavy industry and Elon Musk's vision of 'self-growing cities' on the Moon.
Martin Elvis Astronomer, co-author of the studyJonathan McDowell Astronomer, co-author of the study
Jeff Bezos Entrepreneur cited as advocate of lunar industry
Elon Musk Entrepreneur cited as advocate of lunar settlement
How it unfolded 1 development · click the chart to see its coverage articlesposts
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Elvis and McDowell publish study finding lunar cities are unsustainable
Dr Martin Elvis and Dr Jonathan McDowell publish a feasibility analysis in Frontiers in Space Technologies concluding that even with 98% water recycling efficiency (matching the ISS), a city of one million people on the Moon would run out of water in just over 100 years; without recycling it would last only a few years.
“Even in the best-case scenario, with 98% efficient recycling of water — the same as achieved on the ISS —a one-million-person city will run out of water in just over a century.”
— Martin Elvis -
6 outlets The Moon Doesn’t Have Enough Water For Musk’s ‘Self-Growing’ City Of Millions, Researchers Say
first by Forbes Business, 9d ago · also Times of India, Gadget Review, Gizmodo, NewsNation, Forbes
5 more headlines
- Elon Musk wants a ‘self-growing city’ on the Moon within 10 years: Does the Moon have enough water for a city of millions? The Times of India · 8d ago
- Musk Wants a Moon City in 10 Years: A Million-Person Moon City Would Run Out of Water in 2.4 Years, Study Finds Gadget Review · 8d ago
- Musk Wants a Self-Growing Moon City in 10 Years. Here’s When the Water Runs Out Gizmodo · 8d ago
- Musk wants a ‘self-growing city’ on the Moon: Does the Moon have enough water? Times of India · 8d ago
- Moon doesn’t have enough water to sustain big city: Study NewsNation · 3d ago
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first by Phys.org, 10d ago · also Space, CP24, CTV News, CNN, KSL News
2 more headlines
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The water on the moon could likely support a small village or town, but not a large “metropolis,” a recent paper found.
2 more of the top 3 · 81 posts in this stretch
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Martin Elvis and I talk about the importants of water resource management for the future of lunar settlement abcnews.com/Internationa... Forget lunar metropolises: Wat...
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The Moon and Ceres are both planetary bodies, with sufficient mass to be astronomical "(canonical) planets" in other circumstances. ~~~~~ 2006 IAU definition of the abstract construct, appropriating the common word "planet" as a jargon label: A planet is a celestial body that (a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its…
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background
Orbiting missions confirm large water ice deposits at lunar poles — A succession of Moon-orbiting missions since 2013 mapped likely locations of water ice trapped in permanently shadowed polar craters, estimated at up to a billion tons, fueling speculation about permanent lunar settlement.
Also covered reported alongside — the timeline has no entry for these yet
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first by The Times, 10d ago · also India Today
1 more headline
- Future cities on the Moon will run out of water faster than you think. Here's why India Today · 8d ago
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1 outlet Forget lunar metropolises: Water limits could cap moon's population, scientists say - ABC News
first by Breaking News, Latest News and Videos, 10d ago
1 more headline
and 3 smaller pieces
What people are saying 21 voices from 2 sites · best of 81 · verbatim
- Sep 19
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Probably the factor of how an independent colony could function without having immediate resources from Earth available. Including how to build structures and such. The other goal is Mars, and I’d say doing test runs for a small colony on the moon first is a lot less risky than going straight to Mars, where if something goes wrong, it’ll take…
- Sep 17
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It'll be interesting to see what materials science people will be able to do once we have decent quantities of lunar regolith samples they can play around with to figure out how to turn it into bricks or slabs for construction. My guess: grind it up into a powder, mix that powder with some raw regolith, and then some kind of expanding foam…
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So for one million people to survive on the moon we just need to send about five million people and then extract the water from four million of them. Don’t know everyone is making this so difficult. /jk The real answer would be to find water rich asteroids within our solar system and then transport them to the moon. Not sure what the logistics of…
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It's very likely we will get better at recycling. It takes Earth millions of years to recycle some of its water. The full process on Earth is insane, involving sunken oceans and volcanoes returning the water from under Earth's crust. The standard water cycle, involving evaporation, is only a small part of how Earth's water works. You can't…
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Just the same filtering as you would with anything, be it a mix of physical (e.g., if not dissolved) and chemical (e.g., if dissolved), largely. Also a lot more care needed to do so safety/completely enough, to the point where it's presumably usually not worth it for a lot of cases. As for irradiated stuff, it does get damaged by the process…
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I think you're overestimating how water recycling systems work. The water combines with other elements and forms new substances. Concrete is 50% water. However, you cannot extract the water with these filtration systems once it is combined. This type of chemical combination, which are not easily reversible, happens everywhere with water and…
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Yeah AGI (human-level AI) will create a two-person society. Humans will not accept another species with the same intelligence, or even greater intelligent, competing with us. The trillionaires will own the AGIs. Most biological humans will be born without assets as babies who need 20 years of education. The AGI will be born with the intelligence…
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This isnt much of an issue. i had the unfortunate experience of working on novel cements for nuclear waste encapsulation, portland cement wasnt cutting it for the timescales involved so we were looking at alternatives. We have plenty of cement like materials and geopolymers that are compadable to portland cement, basically a catalog, and some dont…
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Yeah the lunar dust might make pretty quick work out of standard solar panels, but I bet nasa's got some ideas for protective coatings there. Solar is not fuel, and you do need propellant - not just energy - to power rockets. I believe the plan is to use the solar energy to extract/collect hydrogen and oxygen from moon rocks, which can then serve…
- Sep 16
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The recently opened Vera Rubin telescope should drastically reduce the odds of that happening as time goes on, because it's scanning the entire sky quickly and frequently and flagging anything that moves (10-20 TB's of data every day). Scientists estimate more than 95% of Solar System asteroids big enough to kill Earth are already known about, and…
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I think the idea is that all the resources don’t need to be transported to the moon first. It’s more or less made up of the same stuff as earth so it has a lot of the heavier building materials we would need in space already. Just need to get specialized equipment up that can mine, refine and utilize the materials that are there. And apparently…
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but when all the resources need to first be transported from earth to the moon, what’s the benefit? Initially that would be the case, but the long term sustainable plan is to get asteroid mining going. You don't want to pull anything out of Earth gravity well that you don't have to because of how much energy that takes. Instead you'd mine…
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So it’s beneficial to launch parts and resources from earth into space, land them on the moon and then launch from the moon? I would have assumed like in science fiction that if we are building ships to travel long distances, then it makes sense to have a separate vehicle for launching and landing then what is used to move between the locations. I…
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Are you sure rocket engines are going to get us to the stars? I doubt we’ll ever make it. If we come up with a far better propulsion system we might be able to send small robotic craft in a time frame that makes sense. But when they get there, what? Round trip for a message-reply between Earth and the nearest star is 8 years.
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Moon makes sense to me still. Astronauts have spent more than a year in microgravity and lived - Moon's gravity is infinitely better. Why couldn't there be a permanent settlement in the form of a work/science colony? People coming in for weeks, months, or even years at a time - depending on how health fares - to do stuff there and come back. There…
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Why don't the people writing these articles take into consideration that water would most likely be transported to the colonies in various fashions and not just transported from craters that have ice water in them. If a colony is lacking something, that's what transports would be for. The premise of the article is like saying "Humans can't…
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The moon doesn't have anything you'd want to send anywhere. Everything it has is more abundant and more accessible on Mars, so anything you'd actually be sending to Mars would first have to be landed on the moon from Earth. And stopping in lunar orbit costs as much propellant as traveling to and landing on Mars. There is nothing to gain by…
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Mass. A large orbiting space station would require significant mass or constant positioning thrust, and the associated fuel mass, to maintain trajectory / orbit if used for many / large vehicles docking or departing. Even more so if anything is to launch directly from the space station. And then there's the mass needed to form, even just maintain…
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It's more likely that we'll use up the water on the moon by creating rocket fuel with it. There's no reason to have a 1 million person colony on the moon in the near future, but there is plenty of reason to use up the water that's already there for intrastellar logistics in the near future. Any distant future where a 1 million person moon colony…
- Sep 14
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No cities on the # Moon - a billion tons of water is not enough for sustainability: https://www. frontiersin.org/journals/space -technologies/articles/10.3389/frspt.2026.1894104/full -> "Unless recycling can be improved by factors of about 10, or a similarly greater water supply is discovered, this result precludes large-scale long-term human…
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The discovery of water in dark craters at the moon's poles has sparked a "moon rush" to establish bases there, and then villages, cities and heavy industry. How sustainable is this rush? View article View summary #^ No cities on the moon — there isn't enough water, scientists say (op-ed) The discovery of water at the poles of the moon has inspired…