Luna 2076 – The Geopolitics of Lunar Colonization

NAS Identifies Four Priorities for Manned Moon Missions

October 22, 2026

*Pins indicate locations of priority sites.*

The National Academy of Sciences has identified four priority sites for future crewed missions to the Moon. “Exploring these four lunar sites will allow astronauts to pursue important cross-disciplinary scientific questions and provide a deeper understanding of how humans could live and thrive on the moon,” says a summary of the report.

The four sites include:

Bhabha Crater
Bhabha Crater would be the farthest and most isolated location humans have ever explored. Human explorers would be able to access material from the moon’s oldest preserved impact basin, investigate the lunar crust on the far side of the moon, and deploy radio and optical astronomy experiments.

Mons Hadley
On the near side of the moon, the Mons Hadley region is near the landing site for the Apollo 15 mission. Revisiting the site would provide new information for future crewed missions by allowing the study of hardware and biological materials left exposed to the lunar environment for more than 50 years. At Mons Hadley, explorers could collect new geological samples and samples from the Apollo 15 site to inform the Artemis program and moon-to-Mars planning. This site would also be suitable for a space weather observatory and an experiment to assess how material from the moon’s surface may mitigate radiation hazards, the report says.

Orientale Basin
On the outer edge of the moon’s disk as seen from Earth, the Orientale Basin provides access to the best-preserved, large, multi-ringed impact basin in the solar system. Visiting this site would offer an unmatched variety of geological materials and a seismically quiet environment that will yield insight into the deep structure and origin of the moon, the report says. Mission crews should return samples from the basin to Earth to better understand how the basin was formed, as well as deploy a gravitational wave observatory.

Aristarchus Plateau
Rising dramatically from ancient lava flows on the near side of the moon, the Aristarchus Plateau is a geologically rich volcanic landscape. This site would provide the opportunity to collect samples that will yield insight into the variety of volcanic processes that have shaped the moon and potentially important resources that could support future exploration. This site would also be suitable for establishing a space weather observatory to improve space weather forecasting and for assessing how material from the moon’s surface may mitigate radiation hazards.

Will Resource Constraints Throttle Settlement Growth on the Moon?

October 18, 2026

*Grok imagines what an element-disassembly apparatus might look like in an underground cavern on the Moon.*

The Moon may lack the water, power and other resources to support large populations on the Moon, according to a report in the journal Frontiers in Space Technologies. Forbes magazine and ABC News have spun the article as skeptical of Elon Musk’s plans to build a “self-growing” city of millions of lunar settlers.

“There’s been so much talk and enthusiasm about a future in which the moon is a part of our civilization and abundantly populated, and science fiction shows with extensive cities on the moon and space traffic around it, and so we just wanted to, I guess, throw some cold water, literally, on some of that overoptimism,” co-author Martin Elvis told ABC News.

Co-author Jonathan McDowell said there will be settlements on the Moon but that “there are physics limits to how much of a lunar society you can end up having.”

Water harbored in craters in the Moon’s South Pole could amount to as much as a billion tons, which sounds like a lot, but Elvis and McDowell question if it’s sufficient to sustain a large lunar population over a long period of time. Without recycling, that volume of water would last a city of a million people about two years. With recycling recovery of 98%, a city might last 100 years. “That’s not very much, given the investment in building it,” Elvis said.

Another limit, Elvis told ABC News, was electric power, although he conceded that solar and nuclear power are both options. While a large city may not be realistic, he and McDowell said, a Moon “village” of about 1,000 — comparable to the winter-over population of Antarctica — could be sustainable.

Resource scarcity will be a formidable, though not insurmountable, challenge. I grappled with the issue when writing “Dust Mites” and “Trogs.” It was apparent even to my uncredentialed eye that a billion tons of water in polar craters would be insufficient to support a city of 1.5 million inhabitants (as I envisioned the protagonist colony Galileo Station to be), much less dozens of settlements or the use of the Moon as a “gasoline station” for travel throughout the solar system.

Notes on Lunar Warfare

October 16, 2026

This essay was published originally as an appendix to “Trogs.”

*AV’s LOCUST X3 laser weapon system. (Colin Demarest), by way of Laser Wars*

“Trogs” weaves together several themes, the most important of which describes Galileo Station’s military struggle for independence from the United States. A major challenge I had in writing the book was imagining what lunar warfare might look like. What new military technologies will emerge over the next 50 years? What challenges will humans encounter in a hostile lunar environment? How far will Artificial Intelligence and robotics advance in five decades of accelerating progress?

Readers should not take the world (and moon) described by “Trogs” as an effort to predict the future. My aim is modest: to imagine a plausible future that (1) is consistent with where we are now, what we can see on the near horizon, and what we can reasonably extrapolate 50 years ahead; (2) is within the bounds of chemistry, physics and economic feasibility; and (3) conforms to the constraints of the lunar environment. While my vision likely will not pan out in all particulars, none of what I describe is wave-a-magic-wand fantasy.

The Future of Earth warfare is now

Many technologies deemed futuristic only a few years ago are being deployed today. Continue reading.

Natural Intelligence & the Logic of Consciousness

October 15, 2026

by Antonio Damasio
Pantheon Books

News media are gripped by AI panic, the fear that AI agents will go rogue and inflict indescribable horrors upon mankind. As AI policy becomes increasingly politicized, the punditocracy seems to be in no mood to air issues calmly and deliberately. Voices of reason can be found, but most are relegated to the realm of books… which means their thinking is inaccessible to the vast majority of Americans who imbibe their information from the likes of TikTok and CNN. Let’s face it, fear sells.

One voice of non-politicized sanity is Antonio Damasio, a professor of Neuroscience, Psychology and Philosophy at the University of Southern California. His long-abiding interest has been the phenomenon of consciousness — more specifically, consciousness as it exists in the “natural” world of biological creatures, not in the realm of artificial intelligence. In his most recent book, “Natural Intelligence & the Logic of Consciousness,” he adds critical context to the AI debate by arguing that consciousness — or sentience, or self-aware intelligence — is not a purely cognitive phenomenon, as many treat it, but is an intrinsically biological phenomenon.

The implication of Damasio’s work, as I interpret it, is that Artificial Intelligence, even human-like General Intelligence, will never reach self-aware consciousness. AI eventually will become supremely adept at mimicking consciousness but will not — cannot — achieve it. AI agents may “go rogue” because of the failure of human designers to build appropriate safeguards, but they will not be acting out of a conscious volition of their own.

Damasio never says this explicitly (and he may or may not agree with my extrapolation of his arguments), but he comes close. Consciousness, he argues, arises from feelings. Robots and AI agents don’t have feelings.

America’s Competitive Advantage in Space

October 11, 2026

Source: OECD, “The Space Economy at a Glance“

Bezos: The Moon Is a Gift

October 9, 2026

In a Fox News interview, founder and owner of Blue Origin, gazillionaire Jeff Bezos makes the case for prioritizing settlement of the Moon over Mars.

“It’s not good to skip steps. … We need to go to the Moon first. The Moon is a gift. It’s only three days away from Earth. … You don’t need to wait for special launch windows. And it has all these resources we can utilize. It takes 28 times less energy to lift something off the Moon, because of its lower gravity, than it does to lift something off the Earth. [We here at Blue Origin] are working on building solar cells out of lunar regolith, out of the dirt that’s on the Moon. It’s 20 percent silicon. … We can make solar cells on the Moon. We can make liquid oxygen on the Moon, rocket propellant. We can find water on the Moon. … And it’s a natural body, so when we go to explore it, there are going to be positive surprises.”

From the Seabed to the Moon

October 5, 2026

*Grok imagines what a lunar-based electro-magnetic cannon might look like.*

“Today’s modern battlefield operates from the seabed to cislunar space, Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the Air, Space & Cyber Conference in Maryland last month.

As Mike Wall reminds us in Space.com, where he reports the story, cislunar space extends from Earth to the orbit of the Moon and includes the lunar surface.

It seems all but inevitable that the U.S. Space Force will embrace the Dust Mites/Trogs mantra that he who controls the Moon controls cislunar space, and he who controls cisnlunar space controls the Earth.

Caine provided no details about what the cislunar battlefield might look like. (Wall thinks it will be entirely robotic, focused on taking out the enemy’s satellites). But the general did say this:

Future conflicts will demand that we operate without the assumptions of uncontested access, secure rare areas, or uninterrupted or uncontested sustainment. Our task, my friends. is to adapt right now, so the joint force is prepared to fight, endure and win in global contested environments, from the seabed to cislunar space.

We must continue to ensure that the United States of America can strike anywhere on the globe at the time and place of our choosing, and sustain that force. Our United States Space Force must provide unrivaled space superiority and sustain the associated networks, domain awareness [and] data advantage that the joint force needs to win in space, both now and in the future.

Wall quotes Gen. Douglas Schiess, who also spoke at the conference: “Let me be crystal clear: Today, guardians operate on-orbit weapons that can defend the joint force against space-enabled attacks.” (Guardians are the official name of members of the Space Force.)

Schiess, according to Wall, implied that these on-orbit weapons are electromagnetic rather than kinetic in nature — designed to knock out key systems of adversaries’ satellites rather than destroy the entire spacecraft.

My spin: When will the Moon itself become a battleground?

Nashville, Tenn: a Template for Urban Development on the Moon

September 8, 2026

The Boring Company is now running TWO Prufrock tunnel boring machines simultaneously beneath Nashville, and the engineering happening underground is insane

Prufrock-MB1 and Prufrock-MB2 are actively mining through extremely strong Nashville limestone

Core samples collected…
— X Freeze (@XFreeze) September 8, 2026

A fundamental premise of “Dust Mites” and its sequel novels is that it makes sense to build lunar cities underground. Not only are underground cities safe from radiation and meteorite bombardments, they are 3-D.

The novels revolve around the colony of Galileo Station, set in the center of Clavius Crater. The underground city has four “decks,” or tiers, similar to a cruise ship. The configuration eliminates problems created by 2-dimensional street/transportation grids on Earth. Far more destinations are easily accessible on foot if you can move in three dimensions by way of stairwells and elevators, especially if you throw in widespread use of people movers. More foot traffic translates into less vehicular traffic, which translates into less congested streets.

How, then, are cities built underground? With technology like that pioneered by The Boring Company. This X article by “X Freeze” describes how two Prufrock tunnel boring machines are mining through Tennessee limestone to create miles of tunnel. (Eat your hearts out, Hamas!)

The scale of the project is phenomenal:

The system will connect downtown Nashville and Music City Center with Nashville International Airport, with the airport-to-downtown journey taking roughly 9 minutes More than 40 stations are already in various stages of planning and design TBC also has authorization for up to 25 miles of tunnel within TDOT right-of-way.

And here’s the best part: “The entire system is privately funded … zero taxpayer dollars for construction or operation.”

How does this investment pay for itself? The Hong Kong subway-system model. Create the underground transportation grid. Build subway stations at periodic intervals. And develop high-density projects around the subway stations.

Bot Bottlenecks

September 7, 2026

Frenchie, writing on X, identifies three key bottlenecks for the development of humanoid robots:

Actuators and precision mechanics to enable “bots to achieve strength and precision in compact, lightweight and reliable joints.” The challenge is producing joints that hold up over time at reasonable cost.
Hands and sensing. Seeing an object isn’t sufficient to manipulate it. “You also need to gauge the force, detect when it slips, and correct the movement before dropping it. … The issue isn’t just dexterity — it’s dexterity that withstands repeated use.”
Vision and perception sensors. Recognizing a cup in an image is one thing, knowing where it is in a kitchen is another. “The robot must estimate distances, spot obstacles and tack its own movements to maintain balance.” Required: image sensors, depth sensors, and inertial measurement.

Dozens of companies are working within the humanoid robot value chain. Frenchie predicts phases of hype, followed by pullbacks, followed by real progress. Humanoid robots are coming.

Will the Laser Revolution Trump the Drone Revolution?

September 4, 2026

*Department of War illustration. Take this with a grain of salt. Laser beams are invisible. But invisible laser beams don’t make dramatic photos.*

Drones are revolutionizing warfare. Drones are so revolutionary that they’re outdating all legacy weapon systems. Swarms of super-cheap drones will overwhelm elegant but super-expensive missile defenses. Aircraft carriers are as vulnerable and obsolete today as World War II showed battleships to be. So goes the new conventional wisdom.

Maybe, maybe not.

Back in March, the United States Navy deployed the HELIOS (High-Energy Laser with Integrated Optical Dazzler and Surveillance) directed-energy weapon system on an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer operating in waters near Iran. The technology destroyed four drones in live tests early in the year. Unofficial reports contend that HELIOS have engaged Iranian drones in live fire, although Department of War officials have declined to confirm them.

Here are new economics of warfare. Conventional interceptor missiles cost anywhere between $6 million and $35 million each. Attack drones cost $30,000. But Israel’s newly operational Iron Beam laser costs $2 per shot, argues Ron D. Martin in the Rod Martin Report.

Under President Trump, this is moving fast into deployment, production, and a broad-based defense architecture — alongside expanded missile production, AI-enabled battle management, and a national nuclear-power renaissance. Golden Dome and the Golden Fleet are already being designed around directed energy systems, making the fleet — and ultimately the American people — increasingly invulnerable to attack from above.

Far from making aircraft carriers and other big ships obsolete, laser weaponry makes them virtually impregnable, Martin contends.