What Does It Really Cost to Land a Kilogram on the Moon?

Quotes for lunar delivery span three orders of magnitude, and all of them are "true" — they just sit at different points of the cost stack. NASA's CLPS landers have delivered science payloads at roughly $1–1.2 million per kilogram. Architecture studies for high-cadence reusable systems project figures below $10,000/kg. The free Lunar Launch Economics Calculator lets you build the stack yourself and see which assumptions carry the weight.

Why the gravity well multiplies cost

Each stage of the trip — Earth launch, trans-lunar injection, descent and landing — consumes propellant that itself had to be launched. With chemical propulsion, landing 1 kg on the Moon requires several kilograms in LEO, and per the rocket equation those kilograms multiply, not add. Cheap Earth launch is therefore the foundation of cheap lunar delivery, but only the foundation.

The four levers

The calculator decomposes delivered cost into launch price per kg to LEO, staging architecture (direct vs. refueled vs. depot), lander reuse count, and flight cadence amortizing fixed costs. The instructive result: no single lever gets you from $1M/kg to $10k/kg. It takes cheap launch AND reuse AND cadence — each multiplying the others.

Where ISRU rewrites the equation

A reusable lander refueled with lunar-made propellant no longer imports its return propellant from Earth — the single biggest line in its budget. That's the economic case for polar water ISRU, and you can model it by cutting the lander's imported-propellant fraction and watching delivered cost fall.

FAQ

Why do current missions cost so much?

Expendable hardware, low cadence, and single-mission engineering. A CLPS lander is essentially a hand-built prototype amortized over one flight.

What's a realistic near-term target?

Studies of refueled reusable architectures cluster in the $50k–$200k/kg range at moderate cadence — an order of magnitude below today, an order above the long-term projections.

Is anything uploaded?

No — the calculator runs entirely in your browser.

Try it: Lunar Launch Economics Calculator. Pairs well with the Delta-V Budget Calculator and Lunar ISRU Optimizer.