If we're going to the Moon to stay, that means laying down infrastructure that not only survives the harsh lunar environment, but is actually useful to the people and industries planning to show up. Aerospace's Christina Guidi appeared on Marketplace this week about some of the efforts being made, from LunaNet to space fission.

Host David Brancaccio asked how people and machines might communicate and get around on the lunar surface.

"What we are doing in partnership with NASA for their Artemis missions is creating LunaNet, which is essentially a communications and navigation architecture or system that allows us to communicate to rovers," said Guidi.

And for location? LunaNet will also enable "navigation of the different assets and astronauts, as well. So it's a critical infrastructure that we need to put in place for Artemis to be sustainable."

They also touched on how we can best use the assets already present there, to avoid having to launch building materials along with everything else.

Brancaccio: Yeah, I mean, the infrastructure would include — I don't know — structures, building on the moon. It's a lot cheaper if you can build with stuff that's actually already on the moon. And what that mainly is is that lunar dirt. I guess there's promise there of turning that into usable stuff?

Guidi: That's a key area. In situ resource utilization includes using the lunar regolith to construct structures, to convert the lunar regolith into water and air. There's a lot on the lunar surface that we could actually exploit. But you also have to think about, we have to have power, right? Where are we going to get our power from? We need robotic or mobility devices that would actually push the regolith around to create a landing pad.

There's plenty more to the conversation, which you can listen to in full over at the Marketplace website. And if you want to learn more about LunaNet, there are plenty of details here.