Materials for sustainable lunar exploration: From extreme environment challenges to adaptive material systems

The Moon has long inspired humanity’s imagination of the unknown. For thousands of years, it has remained a distant world that humans could gaze up but could not reach. Since the beginning of the 21st century, new lunar exploration programs have greatly expanded the understanding of the Moon, while a return of humans to the lunar surface is becoming a reality. The Moon is expected to become an important platform for future deep-space exploration. The lunar surface is characterized by extreme environments, including vacuum and low gravity, large temperature gradients, intense radiation, micrometeoroid impact, lunar dust, and energy limitations, which pose significant challenges to the long-term reliability and environmental adaptability of materials for lunar exploration. This perspective argues that the future of materials for lunar exploration lies not in discovering a single superior material, but in designing environment-adaptive material systems through the integration of materials, structures, and manufacturing strategies.