When we think about living on the Moon, our minds tend to fixate on the obvious challenges—habitats, water supply and radiation shielding. Yet quietly underpinning every plan, from temporary science outposts to full-fledged lunar cities, is a more elemental problem: power. Without a steady and scalable energy source, even the most advanced life-support system is just a stranded idea.
What’s surprising is that the solution might be, quite literally, underfoot. Lunar regolith—the gritty, abrasive dust coating the Moon’s surface—has long been treated as a nuisance. It clings to suits, jams equipment, and floats into every crevice like a fine volcanic ash. But in recent months, researchers have demonstrated that this unassuming material might hold the key to building solar panels directly on the Moon. And not as a gimmick, either—as a foundational technology for long-term infrastructure.
At the center of this idea is a simple but compelling transformation: turn Moon dust into glass and use it to build solar cells. Recent findings, published in Device, explore how lunar regolith simulant can be melted into a sheet of glass—what the researchers have dubbed “moonglass”—and then layered with perovskite-based photovoltaic material. The result is a functioning solar cell made almost entirely from local material.
This is where the narrative shifts from interesting to essential. Because the cost of launching hardware from Earth to the Moon is not just high—it’s prohibitive. Even with reusable rockets and optimized trajectories, the payload capacity is limited, and the cost per kilogram remains astronomical. According to the researchers, fabricating solar cells on the Moon instead of importing them could reduce their respective launch mass by more than 99 percent. The cost implications are just as dramatic.
But the advantages aren’t merely economic. Moonglass, it turns out, may offer better durability for space-based solar cells than conventional glass. The naturally occurring impurities in lunar regolith—mostly metal oxides—give the resulting glass a brownish tint. That’s not just cosmetic. It helps shield the underlying photovoltaic material from ultraviolet radiation and cosmic rays, both of which are far more intense on the Moon than on Earth. Conventional Earth-based solar arrays degrade over time in orbit due to this exposure. Moonglass-based ones might hold up better.
The photovoltaic layer itself is equally important. While silicon has dominated Earth’s solar industry, it’s not well suited to remote fabrication. The production process is energy-intensive and demands extremely pure materials. Perovskites, on the other hand, are more forgiving. They can be synthesized from more common precursors and applied in thin films via relatively simple techniques, including vapor deposition or even inkjet-style printing. Their efficiency has risen rapidly in recent years, with some experimental setups rivaling silicon.
That said, producing solar cells on the Moon is no small task. You don’t just sprinkle some regolith into a mold and walk away with a power grid. You need sintering equipment, likely powered by concentrated solar energy, capable of melting and shaping regolith into sheets. You need robotic systems—possibly semi-autonomous—that can reliably apply the perovskite layer and assemble arrays. You need mechanisms for storing energy across the long lunar night, which lasts the equivalent of 14 Earth days. And you need resilience—every system must function with minimal human intervention, because failure could mean loss of habitat support.
Even so, the feasibility curve is bending. In-situ resource utilization (ISRU) is now a cornerstone of space architecture planning. NASA, ESA, and several private organizations are also testing systems for extracting oxygen from regolith, sintering bricks, and building landing pads. Manufacturing power systems from local materials is a logical next step—if not an urgent one.
And there’s a subtle elegance to this idea. For all its technological complexity, the core concept—using the Moon’s own dust to catch its own sunlight—has an undeniable symmetry. What was once a threat to Apollo astronauts, coating visors and clogging joints, may soon power the lights in a lunar greenhouse or regulate temperature in a pressurized lab.
It also hints at something larger. The Moon is not the endgame. Every challenge solved there becomes a proof of concept for other celestial bodies. Mars has its own regolith, rich in iron oxide. Asteroids offer mineral wealth but demand entirely different energy systems. Even the moons of Jupiter, with their punishing radiation belts, will eventually need energy infrastructure that doesn’t rely on constant supply lines from Earth.
So, while the phrase “moondust solar panels” might still sound like something out of speculative fiction, it’s not. It’s quietly becoming an engineering reality. The tests are underway. The simulations are running. The funding, in some cases, is already allocated.
The Moon, for all its poetic distance and desolate surface, may soon become the first proving ground for off-world infrastructure that is made in place, from place. The dust beneath our boots becomes the glass that powers the system that sustains the station that becomes the settlement.
It’s not flashy. Just methodical science, smart design, and the slow unfolding of something that looks very much like permanence.
