10-Year Lunar Architecture Capability Study (LunA-10)

Maj Michael Nayak

It is the year 2035, and a thriving lunar economy exists on the Moon. How did we get there?

DARPA supports a future model where the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), international governments, and commercial industry can rapidly scale up lunar exploration and commerce, enabled and supported by the deployment of an efficiently combined, integrated lunar infrastructure framework. An integrated framework would upend the current technical paradigm, whereby each lunar lander or activity must organically support all required resources such as survival power, communications, and data storage.

The 10-Year Lunar Architecture (LunA-10) will explore the rapid development of foundational technology concepts designed to move away from individual scientific efforts within isolated, self-sufficient systems and toward a series of shareable, scalable, resource-driven systems that interoperate – minimizing lunar footprint and creating monetizable services for future lunar users.

LunA-10 Topic Area 1 (TA-1) focuses on a portfolio of lunar providers and users who will, together, define a series of future integrated lunar frameworks that take advantage of commercial development and nongovernmental funding streams. Each integrated system design and framework will be backed by a quantitative analysis of needs, validated analysis for anticipated use case(s), concepts of operations, scaling analysis for foundational systems, and metrics for integrated system performance. Performers will identify current investments and future technical challenges toward achieving these goals.

LunA-10 is grounded in the Outer Space Treaty (1967). In accordance with Article IV of the treaty, all developments and involvement by civilian and/or military personnel in this effort pertain to scientific and peaceful purposes.

The envisioned lunar architecture is not intended to support human exploration or scientific experimentation that does not have commercial value. DARPA’s LunA-10 TA-1 effort is focused on creating off-Earth economic vibrancy through monetizable commercial services provided to a wide variety of users intending to operate on and around the Moon.

If you have any questions, please reach out to LUNA10@darpa.mil