NASA wants to build a permanent base on the moon. Three San Antonio organizations plan to help by converting 180 acres of farmland on the West Side into a testing site that resembles the lunar surface, all while strengthening local workforce pipelines to the aerospace industry.
The project, known officially as the National Lunar Research Center (NLRC) initiative, is led by Southwest Research Institute.
SwRI announced the project last week and signed a memorandum of understanding with two local collaborators: Astroport Space Technologies, a space construction and materials manufacturing company, and the WEX Foundation, which aims to promote STEM education and build workforce pipelines to the aerospace sector.
The project is currently unfunded. The trio will pursue funding from the Texas Space Commission and NASA, according to Matt Freeman, director of the Department of Space Instrumentation at SwRI.
A unique testing environment
Under the Artemis missions, NASA’s moon-to-Mars program, the space agency is sending astronauts back to the lunar surface and aiming to establish a sustained base there. Ultimately, the missions could set the stage for trips to Mars. The space agency’s goal is to send humans the Red Planet as soon as the early 2030s.
Several facilities in the U.S. and Texas already replicate the moon’s surface and gravity in indoor environments that aerospace companies rely on to test rovers and other equipment before its mission-ready. What makes SwRI’s proposed lunar yard unique, Freeman said, is its scale.
The roughly 180-acre site, currently a SwRI-owned cornfield adjacent to its main campus, could be transformed to resemble the geography and footprint of NASA’s planned moon base.
The space would be large enough to lay out a full haul road roughly a mile long, letting companies run construction equipment and rovers through long-duration testing at full scale, Freeman said.
“The idea is you bring in your construction equipment, you bring in your lunar rovers, and you put them through life cycle testing,” Freeman said. “Once you’ve verified that your equipment works as intended … then you send it off to one of the high-fidelity indoor yards, where they really test it in terms of the reduced gravity.”
Freeman said a NASA expert who works on lunar spacesuits noted that the suits’ radios start to lose range at about the size of the proposed yard, meaning the site could double as a place to test where those communications begin to drop out.
Understanding how lunar regolith — a mixture of rock, glass and dust that coats the moon’s surface — impacts construction materials and equipment will also be critical, Freeman added. Lunar regolith is a mixture of dust, rock and glass
“The moon is not a benign location,” he said. “The regolith [is] nasty stuff. It gets into the seals, it increases friction, it increases wear.”
NASA’s moon base plans include living quarters for the Artemis astronauts, power generation, roads and communications systems. The work would take place in phases, with early groundwork handled largely by uncrewed deliveries and machines, according to NASA.
“You’re not going to see the big construction crews like you would on I-10,” Freeman said. “Anytime you’re sending robots or unmanned vehicles to do this work, you’ve got to be confident that they’re durable enough and they operate properly.”
SwRI owns the land and would serve as the prime contractor, operating the facility much like the environmental testing chambers already on its campus. Astroport, founded in 2020, has been developing the lunar base design and would act as the project’s architect.
“Our lunar civil engineering work for NASA has established a clear engineering baseline for construction on the Moon,” Sam Ximenes, the company’s founder, said in a news release. “The NLRC will provide the infrastructure needed to rehearse these complex operations at scale, validating site preparation and infrastructure tools on Earth for safety and endurance before they are committed to a lunar manifest.”
A local pipeline to the moon
The WEX Foundation was founded to promote STEM education and create a local pipeline to jobs in the aerospace industry and other space-related fields, starting with K-12 education and curriculum development.
The organization focuses on promoting these fields to students from underrepresented backgrounds, with an emphasis on girls, Hispanic students and those from low-income school districts, according to its website.
San Antonio is home to more than 46,000 professionals working in aerospace and defense, according to Greater:SATX, which ranks the region among the top three aerospace talent hubs in Texas.
“The NLRC will represent a turning point in how we prepare humans for a sustained presence on the moon and beyond,” Louise Cantwell, executive director of the WEX Foundation, said in a news release. “The space industry needs welders, electricians, and all manner of skilled workers.”
