Demonstrating the Priority of Lunar Orbital Port Over Lunar Surface Construction: A Descent Corridor with Electromagnetic Cargo Reception

Abstract Plans for lunar development, including the Artemis and International Lunar Research Station plans, assume that bases are built on the lunar surface.1,2 Yet landing is both energy-intensive and failure-prone: only about half of the soft-landing attempts made since 1966 have fully succeeded,3–7 and the surface exposes crews and equipment to long-lasting moonquakes, radiation and sharp-edged dust.8–15 Here we show that long-term stationing, production and logistics are better placed in low lunar orbit, in a distributed ‘Lunar Orbital Port’, than on the surface. Orbital-mechanics calculations indicate that holding a frozen lunar orbit costs propellant comparable to or lower than reboosting the International Space Station,16 whereas landing and departing demands several km/s of velocity change.17,18We then describe a descent corridor in which cargo ejected from the port in a spindle-shaped capsule is decelerated by a long electromagnetic track on the lunar surface, which returns most of the kinetic energy as electricity. This concept study suggests that the main construction layer of lunar development can be placed in orbit first and the surface settled afterwards, and that the delivery corridor is the key technology to verify first.