Sim City: Moon Base Edition

A Simulation of Moon Base Evolution

Inspired by: Toby Li

“SpaceX is now shifting their priorities into building a Moon Base - doing so in less than a decade. This proposal from the ISU involves converting a Starship into a lunar base, Skylab-style.”

Here’s a simulation I ran on the next few phases of this amazing achievement, stylized like our old favorite game Sim City.

Phase I: Seed — First Habitat Established (Year 1)

It begins with two ships and a handful of pioneers. When the first Starship touches down on the silent rim of Shackleton Crater, it carries not just cargo — it carries a promise. Within days, a second vehicle lands bearing the first construction crew ever to set foot on another world with the intent not to visit, but to stay. Using autonomous robots and ingenious cable-rigging systems, the crew tips the supply Starship onto its side, cuts open its massive propellant tanks, and transforms the rocket into the largest pressurized habitat ever placed beyond Earth. As regolith is piled five meters deep over the hull — shielding its occupants from cosmic radiation and micrometeorite impacts — something extraordinary takes shape on the grey lunar plain: not a flag or a footprint, but a home. In just 180 days, humanity’s first permanent address on another celestial body is open for business.

Phase II: Growth — Surface Colony & First Tunnels (Years 2–5)

What was once a solitary mound on the lunar surface is now a constellation of six buried habitats radiating outward like the spokes of a wheel, each one a decommissioned Starship reborn as a living, breathing wing of a growing colony. Pressurized tunnels link them beneath the regolith, and for the first time, astronauts can walk between buildings on another world without ever donning a spacesuit. Below the surface, the colony pushes deeper — excavating its first underground vaults for hydroponic farms bathed in violet grow-light, where lettuce and tomatoes sprout in soil that has never known rain. Water-ice mined from the permanently shadowed craters is split into hydrogen and oxygen, giving the settlement its own air and the beginnings of a local fuel supply. Visiting Starships rotate crews on a regular cadence now, and the landing pads are busy. The colony is no longer an experiment — it is an economy, a community, and a declaration that human ingenuity can flourish anywhere the sun touches, even 240,000 miles from home.

Phase III: City — Selene, A Permanent Lunar Settlement (Years 5–20)

Descend through the airlock, ride the elevator past the utility corridors, and step into the agricultural vault — a cathedral-sized cavern glowing pink and gold with the light of a thousand grow-lamps, the air warm and humid and alive with the scent of green, growing things. This is Selene: a city of four hundred souls living not on the Moon, but inside it. Above, the surface hums with purpose — solar farms trace the sunlit ridgeline, a four-pad spaceport receives regular flights from Earth and, soon, from Mars-bound transit stations, and 3D-printing factories churn out structural components from the very ground beneath them. Below, the real miracle unfolds across four underground levels: farms that feed the population year-round, a town square with a park and projected blue skies where children play, a medical center, workshops, and the deep-infrastructure floor where water purifiers and oxygen generators ensure that every breath is accounted for.

What began as a single rocket tipped on its side has become the seed of a new civilization.

---

The Time Travel Series: using AI to relive the past first person. Two recent episodes:

---