The Artemis Lunar Sustainability Initiative

Ideally, the team would consist of three astronauts, all having similar personality traits such as ambition, creativity, and adaptability. Despite these overlapping characteristics, the crew must also have vastly different skill sets and creative outlooks to ensure that they can thrive off of each other's ideas and specific functionalities, hence optimizing their overall efficiency. While on the moon, they would be tasked with establishing sustainability elements such as renewable oxygen, electricity, food, and water sources. In terms of practicality, to establish a suitable living environment for future humans, they need to recreate the biological conditions that allowed for the development of life on Earth. This would involve bringing a variety of chemoautotrophs and other photosynthetic autotrophs that can survive the moon’s conditions by utilizing the moon’s natural organic materials and producing oxygen that will very gradually work towards developing an atmosphere similar to that of Earth’s. Assuming that the crew will be located in a settlement near a source of frozen water, this effort of atmospherization could also be accelerated by the molecular division of water molecules into hydrogen fuel and oxygen gas. The remaining water can be filtered for drinking purposes and for establishing an indoor agricultural system that could eventually provide food for future astronauts, as well as further assisting in the oxygenation process. It would also be futuristically beneficial to begin the construction of a solar farm on the moon to provide a reliable and sustainable source of energy. Given the time constraint of this mission, it will only be feasible for the astronauts to merely begin this assemblage project. Then, robots and machinery will be responsible for the completion of the solar panels, and in turn, the solar energy captured can be utilized to power rovers and other necessary settlement functions in the future.