A base at the lunar South Pole needs what any town needs: a connection, a map and a clock. This is NASA's own list of how much, how fast and how precise, one phase at a time.
Service region and altitude are to scale. Site positions, relay orbits and relay counts are schematic: the paper sets coverage targets, not a constellation design.
01
Talk
How much data has to move between the Moon and Earth, and over which links. Early missions talk straight to Earth. Relays in lunar orbit take over as they come online.
Peak real-time throughput T2
Megabits per second. Dashed outlines show where the whole program is headed.
02505007501,0001,250 Mbps
┆ Gigabit home fiber, 1,000 Mbps for scale · mine
Availability T2
Share of each Earth day the service is up. For relays, that also means a line of sight to the whole service region.
Relay coverage and availability
Ground station availability
Users online at once T2
Each dot is one user linked at the same moment. "Aggregation" means a surface node gathers everyone's data first and sends it up together.
High rateLow rate+ means "or more"
Data per day T2
Recorded data sent home later, not live.
Large missions, such as an LRO replacement or Orion. Mostly direct to Earth.
Small missions, such as commercial landers.
The links themselves
Radio §III
On the surface §III
Every phase §III
More HD and UHD cameras across the surface, watching spacewalks and construction. Every camera is another user.
02
Navigate
There is no GPS at the Moon, so NASA plans one. The Lunar Augmented Navigation Service, LANS, has relays broadcast a navigation signal. See four or more at once and you can solve for position, velocity and time, just as your phone does on Earth.
How well you know where you are T3
Position knowledge on the surface, drawn to scale. The bright ring is the selected phase.
▭ Olympic pool, 50 × 25 m for scale · mine
Need better than 10 m, say to avoid a hazard or dock? The paper says users add their own sensors, such as LiDAR and cameras, on top of LANS.
The full requirement T3
Knowledge figures are absolute, 3D, 3-sigma.
Why the clock matters
Radio navigation measures distance with time: how long a signal took to arrive. Light covers about 300 metres in a microsecond for scale · mine, which is why the timing targets are so tight. The service must also run on its own time scale, Coordinated Lunar Time, traced back to UTC on Earth.
03
See
Cameras and sensors in orbit map the ground before anyone lands and keep watching after. The South Pole is hard to image: low sun, long shadows, craters that never see daylight.
Sharpness T4
A 2 m × 2 m patch with a 1 m boulder and a 40 cm rock illustrative · mine, drawn at that pixel size. The paper wants pixels under half a metre so small hazards show up.
How often it looks again T4
Moon Base region:
Whole South Pole region:
One week, 168 hours. Each tick is a pass.
Also on the list T4
04
Build
The paper ends with the gaps NASA expects companies to help close. Its advice: watch the SCaN website and SAM.gov for upcoming opportunities.
