Feasibility Study on Lunar Concrete Landing Pad

NASA has the plan for human exploration after the year 2020. This human exploration concept is based on ISRU (In Situ Resource Utilization). The concept of ISRU is reducing delivery cost supporting reasonable and efficient space exploration. And it plans to use the resources of the Moon and equipment at least. According to this human exploration plan, it mentioned how to make landing pad in the Moon such as soil compaction, dust and soft regolith replacement, and the bank construction around landing pad. But there is one problem with removing the dust that cannot be perfectly stabilized. Thus, this paper will present a new approach for landing pad construction in the Moon considering ISRU. First of all, this landing pad construction needs standardized building materials and methods suitable for lunar environment. Since Lunar Concrete using the lunar simulant called KOHLS-1(Korea-Hanyang Lunar Simulant- 1) has enough strength for compression, prototype is manufactured based on it. Then, landing pad is constructed in a similar way to lunar concrete manufacturing method. After making the landing pad, it is applied to feasibility study with SELENE-2 in JAXA, Astrobotic in Google X Prize and so on about compression strength. And the result has shown that it has enough strength which is suitable for other lading scenarios on the Moon.