The value of lunar-derived oxygen and water for an early habitation customer

Establishing a sustained human presence on the lunar surface will require reliable and cost-effective access to life support consumables, particularly oxygen and water. While in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) has historically been evaluated for large-scale propellant production, early lunar habitation, such as the initial habitat concepts supporting the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA’s) Moon Base program, represents a near-term and comparatively underexplored customer. This work presents a lifecycle cost–based methodology to estimate the normalized value of lunar-derived oxygen and water for an early habitation customer, expressed as the avoided lifecycle cost of Earth-based consumable resupply per kilogram delivered to the lunar surface. Leveraging assumptions that reflect initial Moon Base habitation concepts, mission architectures, and logistics paradigms, consumable demand is modeled and translated into delivered mass accounting for containment and packaging overhead. Lifecycle costs are estimated using multiple parametric cost estimating approaches and compared against representative pilot-scale ISRU system concepts to evaluate oxygen only, water only, and combined production architectures. Results emphasize that Earth-based consumable resupply is highly inefficient for early habitation, driven primarily by containment and packaging mass penalties. Oxygen exhibits values more than twice that of water on a per-kilogram basis despite lower demand by mass. Across architectures, normalized values ($U.S. dollars/kg) exceed propulsion-focused ISRU value estimates by several orders of magnitude. These findings suggest that early habitation demand for oxygen and water may represent a compelling initial market for lunar ISRU, providing a practical bridge toward catalyzing a larger scale resource utilization market and building towards a sustained lunar economy.