The establishment of a sustained human presence on the Moon is critically dependent on the ability to utilize local resources, primarily the production of oxygen for life support and propellant. The ROXY (Regolith to Oxygen and metals conversion) process is a molten salt electrolysis technology designed for this purpose. This paper presents an economic analysis of a ROXY pilot plant capable of producing over one ton of oxygen per year. We evaluate the economic viability by analyzing development, transportation, and operational costs against the potential revenue from selling oxygen and metals within a nascent lunar economy. A key aspect of this analysis is the perspective of an early customer in habitation life support systems preceding that of much higher propellant production demand. The analysis contextualizes this paradigm by recognizing that the primary economic driver for oxygen production is the larger future market for propellant; however, early life support demand may incentivize a paradigm-shift from Earth-based consumable resupply. Scenarios based on varying transportation costs and development timelines are evaluated to determine the internal rate of return (IRR) and time to break even (TTBE). The results indicate that the ROXY pilot plant is economically viable, particularly in near-term scenarios with higher transportation costs, achieving a positive IRR of up to 47.4% when both oxygen and metals are sold. The analysis identifies facility mass, driven by the robotics subsystem, as the primary factor for future cost-reduction efforts, concluding that ROXY is a technically and economically sound pathway toward sustainable lunar operations.

Establishing a sustained human presence on the lunar surface will require reliable and cost-effective access to life support consumables, particularly oxygen and water. While in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) has historically been evaluated for large-scale propellant production, early lunar habitation, such as the initial habitat concepts supporting the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA’s) Moon Base program, represents a near-term and comparatively underexplored customer. This work presents a lifecycle cost–based methodology to estimate the normalized value of lunar-derived oxygen and water for an early habitation customer, expressed as the avoided lifecycle cost of Earth-based consumable resupply per kilogram delivered to the lunar surface. Leveraging assumptions that reflect initial Moon Base habitation concepts, mission architectures, and logistics paradigms, consumable demand is modeled and translated into delivered mass accounting for containment and packaging overhead. Lifecycle costs are estimated using multiple parametric cost estimating approaches and compared against representative pilot-scale ISRU system concepts to evaluate oxygen only, water only, and combined production architectures. Results emphasize that Earth-based consumable resupply is highly inefficient for early habitation, driven primarily by containment and packaging mass penalties. Oxygen exhibits values more than twice that of water on a per-kilogram basis despite lower demand by mass. Across architectures, normalized values ($U.S. dollars/kg) exceed propulsion-focused ISRU value estimates by several orders of magnitude. These findings suggest that early habitation demand for oxygen and water may represent a compelling initial market for lunar ISRU, providing a practical bridge toward catalyzing a larger scale resource utilization market and building towards a sustained lunar economy.