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Lunar Site Selection (2023 white paper, filed with the February 2024 workshop briefings)

Document: 15-2024-architecture-workshop-white-paper-lunar-site-selection.pdf, 5 pages, 964,467 bytes, from https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/, fetched 2026-10-01T18:28:04Z (sources/manifest.csv). Listed on the Architecture Workshops page under "February 2024" as "White Paper Briefing: Lunar Site Selection". Text: sources/text/docs/2024-02-15-2024-architecture-workshop-white-paper-lunar-site-selection.txt; page images in sources/raw/slides/2024-02-15-2024-architecture-workshop-white-paper-lunar-site-selection/.

What this file is. Not a slide deck: the 2023 white paper itself, five portrait pages headed "Lunar Site Selection", with "2023 Moon to Mars Architecture" and "white paper" down the side of page 1 and "2023 Moon to Mars Architecture Concept Review" in every footer (images of pages 1 and 4 checked). No authors or date. So the wiki now holds one of the thirteen 2023 papers listed in the February 2024 opening deck (Overview and Updates, slide 11). NASA's White Papers page links a "Lunar Site Selection" PDF of "964 kB" under 2023 (White Papers page); this file has the same size, but the White Papers copy isn't fetched, so the two aren't compared by hash. Printed and PDF page numbers agree (1–5); cite "p. N".

Rank. A 2023 paper, context under SCHEMA ("Versions and dates"), older than Rev B and Rev C. It doesn't mention the Moon Base. The text has no "Moon Base", "CUI" or "Pre-Decisional" (searched).

Summary. How NASA picks lunar landing and operations sites: balancing "where we want to go" (objectives) with "where we can go" (safe landings), and how the balance shifts from Human Lunar Return to the later segments as infrastructure and data accumulate. Its content is on Lunar site selection; this page lists what it holds.

Contents

Page Section What it holds
1 Introduction Site selection "is an iterative process"; "where we want to go" against "where we can go"; HLR landings close to their targets, relaxed later
1 Objectives Traceability Objectives with and without location-specific needs; "a balance between visiting previously unexplored terrain and developing routine and repeatable presence at select locations"
1–3 Lunar Conditions Terrain within the lander's hazard tolerance; data about one meter in resolution, "not universally available across the polar regions"; the first HLR site "sunlit for approximately 6–6.5 days"; "no known location in the South Pole region that is continuously sunlit"; "roughly 11 seasonal cycles per 10 Earth years"; Earth visibility for direct-to-Earth communications; Figures 1 and 2 (lighting and Earth-visibility animations)
3–4 End-to-End Mission Availability EGS, SLS and Orion launch windows; Block 1 reaching lunar orbit "for roughly half of the Moon's orbit around Earth"; the HLS "viable to conduct a lunar landing for about 90 days" in NRHO; Block 1B's co-manifested payload; Gateway and a lunar relay "opening additional lunar site availability"; contingencies; Figure 3
4–5 Site Selection Evolution Reusable surface assets "likely to be consolidated at one or more locations"; returning to the same place "means that site selection drives the mission"; hardware as an obstacle to landings, plume effects and shadowing
5 Summary; Key Take-Aways; References Three take-aways; six references (the ADD, the objectives, the Planetary Data System, LRO QuickMap, "Why Artemis Will Focus on the Lunar South Pole Region", "Why NRHO: The Artemis Orbit")

What the PDF shows that the text loses

  • Figure 3 (p. 4, image checked): six overlapping circles around a hexagon "Mission Availability": "Launch Performance", "Transit Eclipsing", "Site Accessibility", "Communication", "Rendezvous", "Transit Performance". Caption: "Mission availability coordinates across multiple considerations, including vehicle capabilities and lunar environmental and physical characteristics."
  • Figures 1 and 2 are stills from NASA Scientific Visualization Studio animations ("Illumination at the Moon's South Pole, 2023 to 2030"; "Earth and Sun from the Moon's South Pole"); the captions are in the text layer.

What changed by Rev C and since

The wiki's comparison, recorded here and not carried to other pages:

  • Artemis III. The paper has Orion rendezvousing "directly with SpaceX's Starship Human Landing System" on Artemis III, and Artemis III as "the last flight of the Block 1 configuration" (p. 4). The March 2026 sources make Artemis III an Earth-orbit test, with the first landing on Artemis IV (Human Landing System), and Ignition briefed a "Standardized Block 1" SLS with the Centaur V in place of the Exploration Upper Stage (Space Launch System).
  • Gateway. The paper counts on "the presence of Gateway and a lunar relay" for later missions (p. 4); Gateway was paused "in its current form" in March 2026 (Gateway).
  • Segments and legacy decisions. The paper's segments are Rev C's three lunar segments. Its "approximately 6–6.5 days" of sunlight for the first site sits beside Rev C's first sorties of "approximately 6 Earth days" and the NRHO orbit "of around 6.5 days" (LD-07-L; Key definition tasks); the pairing is the wiki's.

Oddities

As printed: "Lunar South Polar Region" in the text's pointer to the 2022 paper (p. 2) against "Lunar South Pole Region" in reference 5 (p. 5); the Workshops page lists the file as a "White Paper Briefing", but it is the paper. The 2024 mobility paper calls this paper a 2022 one in its text and a 2023 one in its references (open question 45); the paper's own sidebar and footers say 2023.

Lunar site selection · Key definition tasks · Human Lunar Return · Moon Base environment · Overview and Updates, February 2024