[Nexialist]

A paper I read recently (Harper 2016 - 10.1089/space.2015.0029) has numbers based on the supplies needed to the ISS.

The gist was, "Without some sort of recycling and/or use of in situ resources, meeting the lunar settlement goal of 100 people would require delivery of over 1 million kilograms of life-support consumables per year."

And then assuming a PLSS life support system you get to to needing about 5500kg of consumables delivered per person per year.

[1] https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/space.2015.0029

[blake1]

So ~5T/person/year, let's plug in the Starship launch costs: at $1mn/T, this is only $500mn/year for the whole base. This seems a little too good to be true.

[tsimionescu]

The Starship promised launch cost is literally two orders of magnitude smaller than current launch costs. I would start there.

[XorNot]

Isn't this pretty much the point of such an endeavor though, or at least part of one?

There's a lot of science we'd like to do on the moon, chief of which would be to actually test the space-settlement self-sufficiency problems in an environment like that.

With the ISS as comparison, it's not going to be "bam 100 people" it's pretty obviously going to be a process of rotating in progressively larger crews while the systems and bottlenecks are worked out. Not to mention we'll benefit a lot from the sort of focused sustainability research this will generate.

[WalterBright]

All the biomass would have to be recycled back into water and food.

The gating thing may be if lunar dust is workable as raw material for soil or not.

[Beached]

there are experiments with moon simulant and mars simulant. both show that with proper prep, regolith is a sufficient grow medium. just as is, it sucks, but if you wash, and then fertilize, it will work. and then after the initial prep, you treat it like you would other soil.