Rovers, regolith, robots: The blueprint for the moon
The "soil" blanketing the moon's surface isn't actually soil. It's a fine, lethal, abrasive powder of shattered rock and jagged glass that shreds gaskets, chews through seals, and hangs in an airless environment blasted by unfiltered radiation and temperature swings that can warp steel. Scientists call it lunar regolith.
To engineers and the space community, lunar regolith is one of the most hostile construction materials in the human story. To researchers at Texas A&M University, it's the raw material for humanity's next frontier of a permanent lunar settlement.
With NASA's unveiling of its new Lunar Innovation Parkâa base designed to support human presence and operations in the lunar environmentâthe university is emerging as a key player in the agency's most urgent challenge: how to do construction on the moon.
"We are moving past the era of 'flags and footprints,'" said Dr. Patrick Suermann, professor of construction science at the College of Architecture and retired U.S. Air Force lieutenant colonel. "We have to stop thinking like explorers and start thinking like settlers. That means building with what's underneath our boots."
Suermann recently presented his vision and work at the 2026 Earth & Space conference, hosted at the Texas A&M Hotel and Conference Center.
The million-dollar problem
To build a civilization, humans can't be space tourists carrying their own luggage; future settlers will have to use the resources already on the moon. "It costs roughly $1 million to $1.3 million per kilogram to ship materials to the moon," Suermann said.
The economics become even more staggering when scaled. A 2018 report on lunar architecture estimated that transporting rocket propellant from Earth to the moon costs roughly $10,000 per kilogram. But, if that same fuel was produced on the moon, the estimated cost plummets to just $500, almost 20 times cheaper.
"The high cost of shipping to the moon is the million-dollar problem," Suermann said. "Every time you can cut the mass of a payload, you save a fortune. That's why the future depends on building infrastructure from resources already on the moon."
The command center for the space race
The idea of building on the moon using its own resources sits at the center of a growing collaboration between the university, private industry, and government agency partners. Helping spearhead this effort is the Texas A&M Space Institute led by Dr. Robert Ambrose, professor of mechanical engineering at the College of Engineering.
Backed by a historic $200 million investment from the Texas Legislature and situated next door to the Johnson Space Center in Houston, the institute is designed to be the nation's premier hub for off-world research, robotics, and testing.
"One of the most exciting features of the 240-acre facility is it's two-and-a-half acre testing areas: one replicating the surface of the moon, the other Mars," Suermann said.
The institute simulates the brutal realities of extraterrestrial construction while ushering in a new generation of robotics, autonomous systems, and space rovers through a direct pipeline from the Robotics and Automation Design (RAD) Lab.
But the Space Institute is more than a research campus, it's a hub of innovation. "It isn't just a facility," Suermann said. "It's a place to get young investigators and the next generation of researchers excited and prepared to tackle the biggest challenges in space exploration."
The lunar foreman
While the institute provides the landscape, the Construction Automation, Safety and Education (CASE) Lab, led by Dr. Gilles Albeaino, assistant professor of construction science at the College of Architecture, focuses on the industrial "brain" of future lunar construction.
Here, researchers are pioneering the use of mixed reality, or how humans and machines will work together as partners, rather than simple remote-controlled tools.
Future lunar construction sites may look like scenes from a science fiction movie: rovers hauling regolith across the moon's surface, robotic arms printing walls layer by layer, and engineers on Earth overseeing operations through VR headsets.
"On the moon, construction operations will depend on semi-autonomous robotic systems," Suermann said. "The CASE lab is leading research into how humans and machines can work together in environments where humans can't safely do everything themselves."
That challenge is magnified on the moon. There is no natural shielding from radiation, temperatures swing violently between lunar night and day, dust can permeate equipment, and even simple repairs become high-risk operations.
"Every tool matters. Every ounce of material you ship matters," Suermann said. "So, the question becomes: how do you use the environment itself as your supply chain, and how can you augment machines to become your partner in austere environments?"
From the Arctic to Afghanistan
For Suermann, the lessons shaping lunar construction don't just stem from his academic endeavors in modeling and designing informatics and building sciences. They also come from two decades spent serving in some of Earth's harshest environments.
Before joining Texas A&M in 2017, Suermann served in the U.S. Air Force, deploying to isolated regions like Guam and Greenland. His mission? Build sustainable infrastructure and bases that support military operations.
"My experiences in serving the U.S. Air Force were formative, and transformative," Suermann said. "It taught me a great deal about construction, and that what can go wrong will go wrong."
One deployment in Afghanistan left a particularly lasting impression. He led a joint military operation for the building of a runway and base in the middle of a desert no-man's-land. "The sand was this fine, talcum-like, powdered mesh," Suermann said. "Hidden under it were these massive boulders."
The construction logistics were a nightmare. To Suermann, though, it was an exciting engineering expeditionâa strangely familiar feeling to the challenges researchers now face in planning for lunar expeditions.
"It shows, to me, that lunar regolith isn't too dissimilar from the terrain we have here on Earth," Suermann said. "At the end of the day, construction is construction."
Today, Suermann is passing that expeditionary spirit to mission partners, academic collaborators, and a new generation of Aggies.
In the halls of the College of Architecture, his expertise plays an interdisciplinary symphony across engineering, management, and technologyâconducting a scientific tune where theories meet impactful discoveries and applications.
"The beauty of construction folks is that we take the ideas that live in computer simulations and make them come to life," Suermann said. "It's not an assembly line; it's ideas that we turn into universal applications. To lead the future, you have to know how things are done now."
As NASA moves toward its 2040 goal for a permanent lunar base, the Aggie mission remains clear: not just to visit the moon, but to stay there. And they're building that future one layer of lunar regolith at a time.
Lunar regolith is nasty stuff, but can also be useful if we learn how to work with it. And the lunar crust is full of rock we can smelt to create aluminum, glass, and oxygen, among other valuable raw materials.
