Data sources

Credits & NASA sources

Every cost, mass, power spec, and TRL in LunaSim comes from a public document. Here's where.

Not affiliated with NASA. Mission names, hardware, and agency references are drawn from publicly available NASA technical reports, peer-reviewed research, and industry filings. Used under fair use for educational purposes. Not endorsed by NASA, ESA, JAXA, SpaceX, or any other organization referenced in the game.

Power & nuclear

  • Kilopower and Fission Surface Power specs from NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS). KRUSTY test results, 40 kW FSP concept studies, mass and power densities.
  • MMRTG radioisotope power from NASA spec sheets (Curiosity, Perseverance rovers). 110 W electrical, 2000 W thermal, 45 kg.
  • Battery performance in extreme lunar temperatures — peer-reviewed literature on LiFePO₄ survival at −173 °C and thermal control mass overhead.
  • Solar array efficiency normalized to 0.29 from ISS ROSA and recent flexible thin-film flight data.

ECLSS & crew support

  • BVAD Rev2 (Baseline Values and Assumptions Document, NASA). Canonical ECLSS parameters: water/O₂ consumption, CO₂ production, trash generation, waste mass budgets.
  • ISS ECLSS operational data — 98% water recovery, Sabatier reactor efficiency, failure rates from 20+ years of on-orbit ops.
  • Veggie & APH — ISS plant growth experiments informing the agricultural module crop yields.
  • Yuegong-1 — Chinese bioregenerative ECLSS analog data, 370-day closed-loop experiments informing high-closure system margins.

ISRU & regolith

  • LCROSS impact data— 5.6% water-ice concentration in Shackleton's permanently shadowed craters. Drives the Water Ice Confirmed dilemma and ISRU yields.
  • ShadowCam / LRO — Sub-meter PSR imaging, site selection maps.
  • Gasteiner et al. (2026) regolith properties database — bulk density, thermal conductivity, compressive strength. Drives construction and radiation-berm mass estimates.
  • Robbins Lunar Crater Database — site modeling, local terrain for the five candidate sites.

Transport & launch

  • CLPS contract data — NASA Commercial Lunar Payload Services delivery costs ($/kg benchmarks across the CLPS vendor pool).
  • Launch vehicle specs — Falcon 9/Heavy, Starship, Blue Moon, SLS. From SpaceX/Blue Origin public filings and NASA SLS program reports.
  • CSIS Aerospace Security Project + Our World in Data historical launch cost dataset (1960–present), powers the Starship Reusability dilemma economics.

Budget, politics & logistics

  • Planetary Society NASA budget dataset — historical and current NASA appropriations, Artemis program cost estimates, congressional budget action. Powers the political events and the $50B baseline.
  • BryceTech space economy reports — commercial market sizing for tourism, mining, and media rights partnerships.
  • MIT SpaceNet— logistics modeling framework for multi-phase campaign planning, calibrates the Builder mode's logistics engine.

Spacesuits, rovers, and Artemis hardware

  • AxEMU — Axiom Space xEMU-derived spacesuit for Artemis III surface EVAs. Specs from Axiom/NASA public briefings.
  • CADRE — Cooperative Autonomous Distributed Robotic Exploration, JPL multi-rover mission concept.
  • LunaNet / DTN — NASA/ESA delay-tolerant networking architecture for cislunar communications.
  • NASA TechPort API — real TRL (Technology Readiness Level) tracking across active NASA projects, informs the TRL gates on Hard/Expert difficulty.

Radiation & environment

  • E3S-2018 — Lunar solar radiation model used for SPE (Solar Particle Event) probability calibration and the dramatic SPE dilemma.
  • NASA LRO cosmic ray data and MSL RAD surface measurements — informs radiation shielding requirements and crew dose budgets.

Game design inspiration

  • Neal.fun — viral, self-contained micro-games with an archetype-style punchline.
  • Budget Hero (American Public Media) — the "real numbers on real tradeoffs" feel of congressional budget simulation.
  • Mars Horizon — the space-program-as-game approach, mission planning ergonomics.
  • Frostpunk — the dilemma structure where every option is bad. Cited explicitly in the GDD.

License

LunaSim is open source under Apache 2.0. Source: github.com/Pipeliner/moonbase. Issues and contributions welcome.