Every requirement on the page is copied from one document: NASA SCaN's Lunar Communications, PNT and Observability Industry Demand Signal, dated August 28, 2026. Each figure carries a small tag, T1 to T4 or §III, naming the table or section it came from, so anyone can check it against the PDF.
Where a lay reader needs a yardstick, the page offers one, but those are mine and are tagged mine in a dashed gold box: gigabit home fiber, an Olympic pool, how far light travels in a microsecond, and the illustrative rocks in the pixel demo. Nothing else is interpreted, projected or filled in.
The paper is built around NASA's three Moon Base phases, and every table has the same three columns. So all of the data lives in a single file, assets/data.js, one object per phase. The phase switch at the bottom of the screen broadcasts the selected phase, and each section redraws itself from that object. If NASA revises the paper, one file changes.
Phase 2 is the one wrinkle. Table 2 splits it into 2030 and 2032 for throughput and user counts, so those values are stored as lists of milestones, and the page shows both.
The Moon is a three.js sphere with a texture from Solar System Scope (CC BY 4.0, based on NASA LRO data), using the same latitude and longitude convention as the companion GRAIL site. The camera circles below the South Pole.
| Element | Status | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Service region, latitude −84° to −90° | To scale | Table 1. A spherical cap on the Moon's surface. |
| Region altitude, 125 km then 200 km | To scale | Table 1. The cap is lifted to 1 + altitude ÷ 1,737.4 km lunar radii. |
| Number of surface sites | From the paper | Table 1. Phase 3 says "3 to 5+", drawn as five. |
| Where the sites sit | Schematic | The paper gives no coordinates. |
| Relay orbits and relay count | Schematic | The paper sets coverage targets, not a constellation. It says early Phase 1 has fewer than the four relays navigation needs, so Phase 1 shows two. |
The relay orbits are ellipses with their slow, high end over the southern hemisphere, and the satellites move by Kepler's equation, so they really do dawdle there. A link line is drawn only when a relay is above a site's horizon. The "To Earth" line points at the near side, since the Moon always keeps one face toward us.
Pixel demo. A 2 m patch of ground with two rocks is rendered at 1 cm, then each output pixel takes the average of its block, the way a real sensor sees. At 50 cm the whole 2 m patch is only sixteen pixels and even the 1 m boulder is a dark blur. At 25 cm it is sixty-four pixels and the boulder starts to hold its outline.
Revisit strips. One week, 168 hours, with a tick per pass. At a 3 hour revisit that is 56 ticks, at 1.5 hours 112, at 48 hours four, one pass every two days.
Navigation circles. Drawn in metres on one SVG coordinate system, so the 50, 25 and 10 m rings and the pool share a true scale.
Plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript. No framework, no build step, no tracking beyond Vercel Web Analytics. three.js is vendored locally. Dark and light themes, ?phase=2 deep-links a phase, keys 1 to 3 switch phases, and motion stops when your system asks for reduced motion.
An independent explainer, not affiliated with, produced by, or endorsed by NASA. It is not a summary of anything beyond this one public paper, and it is not advice for anyone bidding on the work it describes.