Nowadays, human Moon exploration, and the consequent desire to establish a permanent settlement on its surface, represents one of the most fascinating challenge to face. The permanent presence of a human outpost very far from Earth raises the problem of the huge amount of payload required for the settlement, as well as the need of rapid and in-time supply of material and spare parts useful for all the activities carried out in-situ, including the realization of medicals tools and patient-specific back-up implants.

SMARTIE (Smart Resource Management based on Internet of Things to support Off-Earth Manufacturing of Lunar Infrastructures) is an ESA study to assess the requirements, architecture, hardware and software needs and costs for implementation of an Internet of Manufacturing Things (IoMT) for a lunar human base and associated infrastructure. 

One of the issues facing the development of manned, long duration space missions is how to manage liquids/gases for life support. Gases such as O2, CO2, CH4 etc are inputs and by-products of life support systems, for non-regenerative (open-loop) systems. Stores should be enough to sustain any short duration crew visit and until regenerating (closed loop) systems can be installed.