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Kilometre-high towers made of lunar concrete and covered in solar panels could potentially be used to power a crewed base on the moon.

The moon鈥檚 poles have long been eyed for human habitation. Both poles have regions known as 鈥溾��, where sunlight shines almost constantly, while the聽south pole has an abundance of聽permanently shadowed craters that contain water ice.

These two features could theoretically provide solar power and liquid water for a crewed base, but the surface region of permanent sunlight is only a few square metres in size. At altitude, the area of sunlight is much larger, spanning several hundred square kilometres.

Sephora Ruppert at Harvard University and her colleagues suggest building towers on the moon聽to access this sunlight, using concrete made from lunar soil. The towers could be made by extracting sulphur from the lunar surface, mixing it with the soil and heating the mixture to bind it together.

The moon鈥檚 low gravity means such towers could theoretically be built to great heights without buckling, so in practice the height is limited by the available materials.

The team found that a realistic height for such a tower would be 1 or 2 kilometres, requiring 760 and 4100 tonnes of concrete respectively, stacked in blocks like a concrete igloo. With wide bases tapering upwards, the towers could be covered in solar panels, generating large amounts of power.

鈥淔rom half a kilometre to 2聽kilometres, you can have several聽gigawatts,鈥� says Ruppert.

Thanks to the low gravity, the construction of such towers on the聽moon would be easier than on聽Earth, where the tallest tower 鈥� the 830-metre Burj Khalifa in Dubai聽鈥� took six years to build.

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