Importantly, rather than bring a bunch of Earthly junk to the Moon's relatively pristine surface, ICON's goal is to build the lunar dwellings out of actual lunar materials — Moon dust, broken rocks, and the like.
According to Ballard, learning to build from the Moon's natural regolith ensures the viability of long-term human tenure on the Moon. "If you tried to plan a lunar settlement or a moon base and you had to bring everything with you, every time you wanted to build a new thing it's like another $100M," Ballard. "But once you've got a system that can build almost anything — landing pads, roadways, habitats — and it uses local material, you are probably two or three orders of magnitude cheaper to build a permanent lunar presence than you would be in any other way that we can think of.
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