Founding Note: The Moon Is a Cost Problem
Published May 2026
The Gap
The Moon is not abstractly far away. NASA lists its average distance from Earth as 238,855 miles, or 384,400 kilometers. Source: NASA Moon Facts.
That number is almost comforting. It gives the problem a clean distance. The harder distance is financial, operational, and institutional. Getting one person to the lunar surface is not only a launch event. It is a stack of Earth launch, orbital transfer, rendezvous, landing, life support, surface operations, ascent, return, safety margin, insurance, regulation, and recovery.
CosmosExplore exists to map that stack without turning it into a fantasy ticket price.
The current public baseline is still national-scale. NASA's Office of Inspector General projected the production and operating cost of a single SLS/Orion launch through Artemis IV at $4.1 billion. The report breaks that estimate into about $1.0 billion for Orion, $300 million for the European Service Module, $2.2 billion for SLS, and $568 million for Exploration Ground Systems. Source: NASA OIG IG-22-003.
That is not a permanent law of nature. It is a baseline. CosmosExplore studies what has to move for lunar access to stop looking like national infrastructure and start looking like an engineering path an individual can understand.
Why This Matters Now
The price of reaching orbit and the price of reaching the Moon are no longer the same conversation.
SpaceX's Smallsat Rideshare page advertises missions as low as $350,000, with $350,000 covering 50 kg to sun-synchronous orbit and additional mass at $7,000/kg. Source: SpaceX Rideshare. That price does not buy a human lunar mission. It does something else: it gives the cost model a public commercial anchor for low Earth orbit.
From there, the question becomes decomposition. How much of lunar access is still launch mass? How much is mission assurance? How much is life support, abort capability, lander reuse, docking, propellant staging, surface infrastructure, or regulation? A model that hides these line items is not useful. A model that exposes them can show which assumptions dominate.
ISRU is another example. NASA describes LCROSS as a mission designed to determine whether water ice exists in a permanently shadowed crater near the lunar south pole. Source: NASA LCROSS. Water matters because it can become life-support input or propellant input in some architectures. But "water exists" and "water lowers personal lunar access cost" are different claims. The second claim needs energy, mining, processing, storage, reliability, and transport assumptions.
CosmosExplore will not treat reusable launch, orbital refueling, ISRU, or commercial stations as magic words. Each one has to enter the model as a parameter with a source, a range, and a failure mode.
This is why the organization begins with accounting instead of imagery. A lunar access model should be able to survive a hostile reading. If a route depends on refueling, the model should show where the propellant is launched, transferred, stored, and lost. If a route depends on lander reuse, the model should show what inspection, refurbishment, and cadence assumptions make reuse real. If a route depends on lower launch prices, the model should show whether the gain survives crew systems and mission operations.
What CosmosExplore Will Study
The first research program has six parts.
First: launch economics. CosmosExplore will track public launch-price anchors, payload class, cadence, reuse assumptions, and the difference between price to orbit and cost to a lunar mission.
Second: cislunar logistics. A lunar route may include staging, refueling, docking, transfer vehicles, landers, and return vehicles. Each added interface can reduce mass in one place while adding complexity in another.
Third: life support and human-rating cost. For a person, mass is not only payload. It is environment, consumables, abort modes, medical margin, and verification.
Fourth: lunar surface operations. Landing is not the end of the cost stack. Surface time adds power, thermal, communications, navigation, dust, and ascent constraints.
Fifth: ISRU. Water ice and local resources are real research topics, but their economic value depends on energy cost, equipment mass, throughput, and reliability. CosmosExplore will track them as break-even questions.
Sixth: the household-price target. The point of that target is not to pretend today's route is close. It is to force order-of-magnitude accounting. If the current stack is billions, which segments need one order of magnitude, which need two, and which cannot move until the architecture changes?
Our Approach
The first tool is the lunar cost breakdown model. Version 0 is deliberately simple: mass, price per kilogram, cislunar multiplier, fixed crew-system assumptions, fixed lander assumptions, operations margin, and total model cost. Its defaults are not a promise. They are a transparent place to begin comparing assumptions.
Every model output must carry a boundary. A line item can be source-backed, assumed, or unknown. A result can be a model total, not a quote. A route can be technically imagined, not certified. A cost reduction can be possible in one segment while being erased by risk or operations elsewhere.
CosmosExplore will publish notes that make the Moon legible as a system. The writing should let a serious reader ask better questions: What is the dominant cost? Which assumption matters most? What would have to be reused, refueled, standardized, regulated, or manufactured differently?
The site will also keep negative results. If a tempting shortcut fails because the mass moves elsewhere, the failure belongs in the map. If a cost reduction only works for uncrewed payloads, it should not be carried over into a crewed scenario without a new line item. Personal lunar access needs imagination, but the imagination has to keep its receipts.
The Moon is already reachable. The open question is whether the cost stack can be made small enough, transparent enough, and reliable enough for personal access to become a real design target.