Smart Regolith Containment Units (RCUs) for Lunar Pioneer Development

A permanent human presence beyond Low Earth Orbit (LEO) requires the development of a space economy where off-world materials, services, and products are readily available to sustain human day-to-day life, work, and travel. NASA aims to return humans to the Moon with its Artemis mission and establish a permanent base by the end of this decade. Infrastructure, including landing pads, shelters, blast walls, control towers, and other critical base elements, must be constructed to establish a semi-permanent base on the moon. Further, there is a need to develop a lunar industry to support self-sustainable humans on the Moon by providing critical services such as communication, computing, power, logistics, and maintenance. In this paper, we focus on using Regolith Containment Units (RCUs) in lunar infrastructure construction. We compare RCUs to other proposed lunar construction technologies, including potential use cases aiding astronauts, and finally, we propose a detailed pathway of the first construction and resource extraction on the lunar surface and specific use cases ranging from blast walls to superadobe for storage and greenhouses.