Abstract An increasing number of missions to the Moon are planned for the future. However, their long-term, cumulative impacts on the lunar environment are unknown. Research indicates that some important scientific discovery potential may be permanently lost, and exploration may become challenging due to effects of large-scale human activities. Motivated by these questions, we develop and present a generalizable systems-theoretic framework, called Sustainability Evaluations for Lunar Environment Exploration, for assessing the effects of human-built systems on the lunar environment. We contribute a scale and rate diagram of natural and anthropogenic processes on the Moon to provide comparative assessment of important processes that can dominate environmental effects and carry implications for human operations. Additionally, we derive metrics using functional-relationship diagrams of engineered systems to identify environmental effects based on exchange of matter, energy, and information. We demonstrate computation of two selected metrics: the area of the blast zone due to lunar landings and the trajectory of disturbed regolith mobilized from the lunar surface. For the cases considered, our results show that modern spacecraft (that may transport humans to the Moon) can have a landing blast zone area that would be 2–5 times larger as compared to the estimated landing blast zone area of the Apollo missions and up to 30 times larger as compared to some robotic missions. Overall, our analyses highlight the urgent need for careful and rigorous consideration of the environmental effects of engineered systems on the Moon and for understanding the important trade-offs that exist in preserving and (potentially irreversibly) altering the lunar environment.
Siddiqi et al. (Sun,) studied this question.