The Moon Strikes Back

When JFK delivered his address at Rice University in 1962 - he remarked that before the decade was out, we would put a man on the moon. And we did. JFK’s speechwriter Ted Sorenson, deserves a shout out as the speech is just as inspiring as it was then. (Spotify link)

JFK at Rice University 1962

“We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills…”

Why didn’t we go back to the moon? In the 1970s it was still remarkably expensive to send things to orbit. Pretty much the only thing we could afford to send was people, which we did 6 times. Astronauts walked around, took pictures, and brought back lunar samples. By the end of the Apollo missions in 1972, the Space Race had been won, the NASA budget was contracting and priorities shifted from the Moon to satellites and space shuttles. Sorry to my conspiracy boys. We went to the moon.

Today, getting mass to orbit is 90% cheaper than it was in ‘72, and a return to the moon is coming. This time, the plan has evolved beyond sending astronauts with cameras and shovels. We’re going to use the moon’s resources to set up new capabilities in space. In fact, before this decade is out, we will be producing and using our first lunar resources.

Eugene Cernan preparing to collect Lunar soil

Moon Water

What does the moon have of value you may wonder? The lunar surface, called regolith, has water, oxygen, aluminum, silicon, and helium-3. All of these can be used in some capacity for space infrastructure. The moon is about the size of Australia & Africa combined so there is plenty of area to set up operations.

Lunar ice has been confirmed to exist in concentrations on the poles. That’s why the landing sites near the poles are the points of interest in the new space race with China. Whoever has access to water has a chance of setting up a sustainable presence on the moon and beyond.

Known areas of ice deposits on the lunar poles

Any sort of human settlement would need water. But water is also key for something more important - producing liquid oxygen (LOX) for re-fueling rockets on the moon.

Regolith to Rocket

Oxygen — essential for human life, and a key component of rocket fuel. Lunar water can be electrolyzed to separate hydrogen and oxygen. Capturing and liquefying oxygen would enable the oxidizer component of rocket fuel to be produced and used directly on the Moon’s surface. A trip to Mars with a layover on the Moon seems not too far off.

Space based fuel depots using lunar resources is a decades long project. The US Military views it as strategically important. Which is probably why DARPA spun up the LASSO program to identify the optimal mining locations for water. All of the materials are there to do it & it is a more scalable long term option than launching multiple starships and having them refuel one another.

DARPAs LASSO program agenda - identify areas of high water concentration on the moon.

The team at Ethos Space here in LA is already working to put gas stations on the moon. They aim to be the first lunar construction company - starting with paving landing pads. Repeatable locations to take off and land at will make all lunar activities easier They will use a solar powered lunar rover to turn regolith into a glass like surface. Simultaneously, their Pantheon system will use liquid oxygen (LOX) extracted from lunar regolith to provide 80% of the propellant mass for spaceflight. Disclaimer: The Ethos team has been nice enough to have me by their offices and I’m a fan. See some pics below:

Vacuum chamber at Ethos Space used for turning anorthosite into hard surface. Far right image shows the material after being hit w/ extreme heat.

Robots do the heavy lifting

Starpath Robotics, another SoCal company, also wants to get into the lunar oxygen game. They are planning to build a fleet of mining rovers, a refinery and a vertically deployable solar array to aid their LOX production. Initial configurations of their system can produce enough liquid oxygen to refuel up to 10 Starship class vehicles per year!

Both companies are planning to do their work using robots, which makes a lot of sense considering how difficult sustained human presence on the moon will be. Robots will do the bulk of the work industrializing the moon. Robotics continue to improve, and advances in space based connectivity (which I talked about here) allows teleoperation to be possible from space stations or even Earth.

Starpath Robotics system design.

Power needs

Just a few weeks ago, Interlune announced a lunar excavator which will be used to mine the surface of the moon for helium 3. Helium-3 can be a fuel source for nuclear power, and is theoretically a cleaner and more powerful alternative to uranium or plutonium. However, there are no functioning helium-3 power plants here on earth. In spite of that, the US Department of Energy has agreed to purchase three liters of helium-3 harvested from the Moon for delivery on Earth at today’s commercial market price. The delivery date is no later than April 2029! By the end of the decade we will have lunar materials being used on earth for a potential nuclear reactor.

What about aluminum & silicon? Those two elements make up just over 30% of the moon’s crust by weight. Together they can be used to create space built solar panels.

A Computer on the Moon?

Turning raw moon materials into something usable will take time. Perhaps decades. And energy. An initial water mine would likely be solar powered and would require at least 20 tons of payload and 500 kW of power to produce economically meaningful amounts of rocket propellant (according to this).

Long term there are crazy ideas like turning the Moon into a giant super computer which Palladium published last month.

“The Moon has a surface area of 14.6 million square miles, roughly the size of Asia. If we very conservatively tiled even half the Moon with GPUs and solar panels, the Moon could sustain a billion times the compute of the Colossus cluster and, with a few turns of Moore’s law driving chip technology forward, even a trillion times the compute.”

Palladium makes a compelling case for the moon as a computer including real earth based issues like waste heat and rising energy requirements from AI. It’s a fun read. Still, the launch costs of putting solar panels on half of the moon is $950 Trillion making it a kinda ridiculous idea. But with lunar built panels… maybe not.

A return to the moon is very much underway, and we’ll see some of the results sooner than you may expect.