  This study estimates the cost of building lunar landing pads and examines
whether any construction methods are economically superior to others. Some
proposed methods require large amounts of mass transported from the Earth,
others require high energy consumption on the lunar surface, and others have a
long construction time. Each of these factors contributes direct and indirect
costs to lunar activities. The most important economic variables turn out to be
the transportation cost to the lunar surface and the magnitude of the program
delay cost imposed by a construction method. The cost of a landing pad depends
sensitively on the optimization of the mass and speed of the construction
equipment, so a minimum-cost set of equipment exists for each construction
method within a specified economic scenario. Several scenarios have been
analyzed across a range of transportation costs with both high and low program
delay costs. It is found that microwave sintering is currently the most
favorable method to build the inner, high temperature zone of a lunar landing
pad, although other methods are within the range of uncertainty. The most
favorable method to build the outer, low temperature zone of the landing pad is
also sintering when transportation costs are high, but it switches to polymer
infusion when transportation costs drop below about \$110K/kg to the lunar
surface. It is estimated that the Artemis Basecamp could build a landing pad
with a budgeted line-item cost of \$229M assuming that transportation costs
will be reduced modestly from the current rate \$1M/kg to the lunar surface to
\$300K/kg. A landing pad drops to \$130M when the transportation cost drops
further to \$100K/kg, or to \$47M if transportation costs fall below \$10K/kg.
Ultimately, landing pads can be built around the Moon at very low cost, due to
economies of scale.
