Mapping The Moon’s “Address System”: Selenodesy, Cadastral Grids, And Land-Use Planning
How a shared reference frame becomes the backbone for safe siting, permits, and conflict-free operations
The first decisions on the Moon are prosaic: where to put a landing pad, which corridor a rover may use, how to mark a safety zone around a drill site, how to reference a radio-quiet boundary so everyone avoids it. All of that assumes a common “address system.” On Earth, that means survey marks tied to geodetic datums and cadastral maps. On the Moon, it starts with selenodesy—a precise, shared reference frame—and grows into a registry of uses that lets operators plan without stepping on each other.
The technical spine already exists. NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter LOLA instrument has built a high-precision global topographic model and geodetic grid, improving the lunar frame to metre-scale accuracy and enabling safe site targeting, mobility planning and illumination analysis at the poles. The programme continues to release data, refining the global shape model and polar products that missions now rely on.
Standards are catching up. The USGS 2024 “Lunar Grid Systems” technical memorandum specifies map projections (Lunar Transverse Mercator, Lunar Polar Stereographic), a Lunar Grid Reference System, and Artemis Condensed Coordinates aimed at navigation and surface science—an explicit attempt to make lunar mapping as interoperable as terrestrial GIS. That stack sits against established celestial/terrestrial reference frames stewarded by the IAU, providing the link between planet-fixed coordinates on the Moon and the inertial frames used for navigation.
An address system alone is not enough; operators also need who-is-where transparency. Earth’s analogue is cadastre: parcels, easements, permitted uses. For the Moon, the legal environment forbids sovereignty or territorial claims, but there are workable tools for transparency and deconfliction. The UN Registration Convention already obliges states to register space objects, creating a baseline of “what is aloft and where,” while the Artemis Accords introduce safety zones as a practical mechanism to communicate areas where operations may pose hazards and need coordination. Academic and policy work has begun to explore how safety zones can be implemented in ways consistent with the Outer Space Treaty—temporary, proportionate, and notice-based—rather than creeping territorial control.
A lunar land-use ledger therefore looks incremental rather than sweeping. First come survey control points—retro-reflectors and fiducials tied to the LOLA frame—so that local engineering (pads, berms, corridors) connects to global coordinates. Laser ranging to LRO and surface reflectors shows the precision available for such a network and helps monitor any long-term frame drift. With control in place, operators can file notices of activity (launch/landing pads, hazard areas, sampling sites) as structured data keyed to the frame, much as aeronautics uses NOTAMs and maritime uses navigational warnings.
The planning questions are practical. Radiation and power push early estates to high-latitude ridgelines with quasi-continuous light; mobility and safety argue for graded corridors between habitat, power, and storage; dust control favours paved pads and set-back distances from sensitive optics. LOLA-derived illumination and slope models are already used in polar landing-site studies—evidence that the reference frame is not academic detail but a siting tool with financial and safety consequences.
Radio science adds a special case. The Moon’s far side is protected in international radio regulations as the Shielded Zone of the Moon (SZM)—a volume naturally screened from Earth’s emissions and uniquely valuable for low-frequency astronomy. Any land-use plan that includes communications relays, power beaming, or mining must respect SZM constraints or risk degrading a once-in-history science site. ITU recommendations define the SZM and earmark passive bands for protection; recent calls from the astronomy community have urged stronger safeguards as mission traffic rises. Here, a cadastral approach is a benefit, not a burden: a map that shows where emissions are restricted is a planning aid for everyone.
Governance can remain light-touch while still useful. A public, machine-readable registry could list: (1) operator and launching state; (2) activity type and duration; (3) minimum safety distances and emissions profiles where relevant; (4) coordinates referenced to the USGS/LOLA frame. None of this implies property in land; it signals operational facts that other users can plan around. The virtue is predictability: insurers can price risk, space traffic managers can deconflict, and scientists can identify conflicts early.
The commercial case is quiet but strong. A common frame minimises re-survey costs for each project, reduces disputes about locations and safety buffers, and shortens design cycles by aligning engineering models to the same coordinate truth. The science case is stronger still: without shared coordinates, mosaicking datasets from multiple missions degrades; with them, cross-mission composites retain their value and unlock better targeting for rovers and drills. That is why selenodesy sits at the base of every serious lunar playbook—it is the invisible infrastructure that lets everything else scale.
A realistic picture of “lunar planning” therefore looks less like terrestrial zoning boards and more like data standards plus notices. The address system comes first; the ledger of uses follows; enforcement remains diplomatic and reputational rather than coercive. In a crowded south-polar decade, that quiet scaffolding—coordinates everyone trusts, notices everyone reads, and boundaries (like the SZM) everyone respects—will determine whether the Moon is orderly engineering or a coordination failure.
