MIRORES will lead the LUNAVEST consortium, with Luxembourg-based SPAIDER Space as a partner.
Transporting water, oxygen and construction materials from Earth increases payload mass and transport costs. Using local resources could reduce those needs, but only if the costs of extraction, processing and delivery prove competitive.
The study will assess who might need lunar products and services, how much it would cost to supply them, and under what conditions the businesses involved could operate profitably.
The model will link resource availability with the costs of extraction, processing, storage and delivery. It will also account for facility construction and maintenance, energy supplies, transport and potential revenue.
The study will separately assess the prospects of energy suppliers, processing-facility operators and transport companies, taking into account their individual costs and need for customers. It will also examine whether companies could share infrastructure and how they might divide costs and risks.
The team will use geological information about the location and concentration of resources and the difficulty of extracting them to estimate the size of facilities needed, energy consumption and costs.
It is developing a methodology and initial models for the entire chain of In-Situ Resource Utilisation (ISRU), meaning the use of resources available locally. Changing assumptions about resources, demand and costs will help determine when an investment might be profitable and when it would not be justified.
The study will examine helium-3, a rare isotope found in lunar regolith. It is used in cooling applications involving equipment that operates at very low temperatures and is being considered as a potential fuel for future nuclear fusion reactors.
The economic assessment would need to include extraction, recovery, transport to Earth and customer demand.
MIRORES is also using results from earlier work on a lunar data platform developed through ESA BIC Poland. The platform combines orbiter data with geological interpretation to help estimate facility requirements, energy consumption and resource acquisition costs.
The company says the analysis could help space agencies and businesses decide which technologies, services and data to develop first, and identify the conditions that must be met before investment. For Polish companies, it could create opportunities in resource exploration and planning a future lunar economy.
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Source: PAP