Paper

Who Hauls the Habitat? A Verified Simulation Testbed, a Pooled Dispatch Marketplace and a Reference Design for Lunar Surface Logistics

Azizjon Rahimov, Roatify Research · version 2, October 2026 · 44 pages · PDF · Code and data

Abstract. NASA's Moon Base plan lands about 4 tonnes of cargo at the lunar south pole before 2029, roughly 60 tonnes in 2029–2032 and 150 tonnes after that. Individual items range from 10 kg instruments to 15-tonne habitats, yet the rovers under contract carry 800–1,600 kg, and NASA's own architecture papers say that no planned vehicle can relocate a large element. NASA's April 2026 architecture guide names "a marketplace for lunar logistics" as a goal but does not say what one would do. We study that question with a discrete-event testbed of surface cargo movement at a nine-site south-pole base, verified against thirteen analytic and published references and cross-checked against an independent browser implementation on 24 metric cells. We compare four dispatch rules: bilateral in-house fleets, pooled greedy dispatch, batched optimal assignment, and a pooled marketplace built on a sequential single-item auction with bundling, consolidation, team lifts, night-aware acceptance and anticipatory staging. Pooling helps only when the fleet is fragmented: the in-house penalty follows a simple law in effective vehicles per owner. Any pooled rule reaches a same-day service level with four vehicles at Phase-2 demand where in-house fleets do not with eight. 1.6 t rovers can move 40 % of the Phase-2 manifest, two lifting together 55 %, a 10 t hauler 88 %, and only 15 t of capacity all of it. A surface move costs about $300 per kilogram moved, a few percent of the cost of landing it.

Correction (October 2026). Version 2's cost per landed kilogram came from an approximation that divided by delivered mass less the bulk released. With the exact metric (landed cargo delivered, bulk and return flows excluded; ratio of means over 30 years, seed-bootstrap 95 % interval) the pooled marketplace costs about $5,500 per landed kilogram rather than about $5,000: $5,525 [4,460, 7,281] at Phase 2 with four vehicles, against $10,019 [8,067, 12,756] for in-house fleets. The cost per kilogram moved is unchanged.

Version 3 (in preparation)

Where the Lander Lands: Landing Precision, Pad Standoff, Plume Keep-Out and Rover Autonomy Priced in Lunar Surface Logistics. Azizjon Rahimov, Roatify Research · Version 3 (draft, October 2026, PDF, 75 pages) · A draft; not yet posted with a DOI.

It puts the base on real LOLA terrain, adds learned landing controllers and a rover driving model to the testbed, and prices landing dispersion, pad standoff, plume keep-out and rover autonomy in the delay and cost of surface delivery, a relation NASA's architecture papers describe only qualitatively. At the typical fleet load, each kilometre of pad standoff adds 35.0 % to the delay of urgent cargo, most of it in the first kilometre; a plume keep-out radius and a stand-down add no measurable delay; landing dispersion adds 8.2 % per e-fold of the mean miss, through landings off the pad. The figures and tables are on the Results page as they are produced, and the method is on the Method page. The final version will be posted here with a DOI.

Cite

@misc{rahimov2026lunarhaul,
  title   = {Where the Lander Lands: Landing Precision, Pad Standoff, Plume Keep-Out and Rover
             Autonomy Priced in Lunar Surface Logistics},
  author  = {Rahimov, Azizjon},
  year    = {2026},
  version = {3.0.0},
  note    = {Draft, October 2026},
  url     = {https://github.com/azizjonrahimov/lunar-logistics-research}
}

A machine-readable citation is in CITATION.cff in the repository.