u/GraphProcessingUnit

This is Concept 001 from a project I've been building (FarsideLab): a crewed base at de Gerlache crater, near the Moon's south pole. I tried to keep it grounded rather than sci-fi - the terrain is real NASA LOLA elevation data at true scale, the lighting is path-traced at the correct low polar sun angles, and the siting is deliberate: right by the permanently shadowed cold traps that may hold water ice. The landers are based on published designs (Blue Origin Mk2, SpaceX HLS); the habitat, power and ISRU pieces are my own plausible interpretation, not an official plan.

What I'd like this sub's take on is the engineering - especially the hard parts:

- Power: some of the high ground here gets near-continuous sunlight while the crater floors stay permanently dark. Do you lean fully on solar on the peaks, or is nuclear unavoidable for riding through the outages?

- Water / ISRU: extracting ice from a permanently shadowed floor (tens of kelvin, never any sunlight) is brutal. Is in-situ extraction worth it early, or do you haul water until the base is big enough to justify the plant?

- The rim-vs-floor tension: power and comms want the lit high ground; the ice wants the dark floor. How would you actually lay a base across that gradient?

- What's the credible path from a first outpost like this to something self-sustaining - and what's the real bottleneck (power, mass to the surface, people, or closed-loop life support)?

Genuinely keen to be corrected where I've got it wrong.

Full technical breakdown - the real-data pipeline, the siting rationale, and an interactive version you can fly around in the browser - is here: https://farsidelab.com/concept/?id=moon-base

De Gerlache crater sits at the lunar south pole, and it's one of the regions NASA has named as a candidate landing site for the first crewed Artemis Moon landing. I wanted to see what a crewed outpost there might actually look like, so I built it on the real terrain.

What's real: The ground is NASA LOLA elevation data at true scale (~5 m/px), and the lighting is path-traced at the correct low polar sun angles, which is why the shadows run so long and the crater floors stay dark. Those permanently shadowed regions are the whole reason the south pole matters. The cold traps in them may hold water ice.

What's concept: the Base itself. I assembled it from published lander designs (a Blue Origin Mk2-style cargo lander, a SpaceX HLS-style lander) plus a plausible habitat, power setup, and a small ISRU experiment by the landing pad. It's my interpretation of Artemis-era surface infrastructure at this site, not an official plan.

I'd like input from people who follow the program closely. What would you add, move, or do differently for a real south-pole outpost? Corrections on the siting or architecture welcome.

This is a solo project. I do 3D visualization work and wanted to ground a concept in real data instead of pure sci-fi.

You can explore the full scene in the browser here: https://farsidelab.com/concept/?id=moon-base

EDIT: Blue Origin's MK2 is a crewed lander, not a cargo lander as stated in the image title.

I built an interactive Moon base you can fly around in the browser.

The pipeline: NASA 5 m/px elevation data displaced at true scale → lit at correct solar values and path-traced in Cycles → camera datasets exported in COLMAP format straight from Blender via a custom add-on → Gaussian splats trained in LichtFeld Studio → served as SOG, webpage rendered with Babylon.js.

This means the splats are trained entirely from synthetic renders with known camera poses — no photogrammetry, no COLMAP step, and zero pose error.

I'm thinking of making more similar concepts and presenting them this way if people find this interesting.

I’m still new to gaussian splatting. All tricks and tips to improve the quality and reduce the file size are highly appreciated. All other comments are welcome also. How does this run in your browser? Any tips for improvements? Criticism also welcome.

Here are numbers behind the splats that are now running on the web page:

• Site, main 3D window - 1.07 M Gaussians – 15.6 MB
• de Gerlache Crater – 0.6 M Gaussians – 8.75 MB
• Blue Origin site – 0.30 M Gaussians – 5.39 MB
• SpaceX HLS – 0.6 M Gaussians – 9.16 MB
• Base – 0.34 M Gaussians – 5.63 MB

You can test it here: https://farsidelab.com/concept/?id=moon-base