As someone who has never cared much about Mars, I’m very happy to see this.
[Title fixed, sorry!]
5 thoughts on “Elon’s Mars To Moon Pivot”
Of interest, China just did a MaxQ abort test of Mengzhou, launched aboard a CZ-10A first stage which then did a powered landing at sea next to its eventual catcher barge. Unless I miss my guess, the sequence will be unmanned, then manned to Tiangong, followed by unmanned then manned to lunar orbit. :Lanyue development will proceed in parallel, with unmanned then manned lunar landing.
Having not yet read Hague’s piece, I think this is a feature not a bug.
It will allow more rapid iteration of design ideas for what will and will not work on the moon. This ought to directly translate to solving similar problems for Mars which would otherwise have inordinately longer lead times.
Musk has a unique opportunity to corner the full coverage communications market on the moon. Slight modifications of Starlink to provide relay and comms links even on the “dark side”.
The trick will be to de-orbit spent birds. You could purposely crash them onto the moon or maybe send them into cis lunar space. I think I’d prefer the latter. Ulitmately, maybe recycle them…
Anyway something he could sell to China for a change…
You need to reverse the two ‘M’ words in your post title.
Hague is, of course, entirely correct.
As someone who wants to see humanity well-established off-Earth in as many places as possible, the SpaceX focus on Mars Uber Alles has long struck me as needlessly restrictive, so I am delighted to see this development too.
Even more delighted as it answers the long-time question of manned space travel skeptics, namely, what is there out there that justifies our going and can pay for the effort to do so? The answer is AI data centers and plenty of them.
The transport, power and industrial infrastructure required to realize this goal will, of course, have myriad other uses as well. Most of these would not have been practical if the entire tab for lunar logistics and industrialization needed to pursue them had to be charged entirely to their account. But they can be pursued profitably once said capabilities are at least modestly well-along.
This should be quite the ride.
And only one of several we are about to be served up by Elon both here and in space.
It would have been quite the alternate future history tho to postulate Musk sending armadas to Mars every two years or so. While NASA struggles to get SLS to run an Artemis mission through the Gateway onto the lunar surface in the same time frames. Hilarious actually…
Of interest, China just did a MaxQ abort test of Mengzhou, launched aboard a CZ-10A first stage which then did a powered landing at sea next to its eventual catcher barge. Unless I miss my guess, the sequence will be unmanned, then manned to Tiangong, followed by unmanned then manned to lunar orbit. :Lanyue development will proceed in parallel, with unmanned then manned lunar landing.
Having not yet read Hague’s piece, I think this is a feature not a bug.
It will allow more rapid iteration of design ideas for what will and will not work on the moon. This ought to directly translate to solving similar problems for Mars which would otherwise have inordinately longer lead times.
Musk has a unique opportunity to corner the full coverage communications market on the moon. Slight modifications of Starlink to provide relay and comms links even on the “dark side”.
The trick will be to de-orbit spent birds. You could purposely crash them onto the moon or maybe send them into cis lunar space. I think I’d prefer the latter. Ulitmately, maybe recycle them…
Anyway something he could sell to China for a change…
You need to reverse the two ‘M’ words in your post title.
Hague is, of course, entirely correct.
As someone who wants to see humanity well-established off-Earth in as many places as possible, the SpaceX focus on Mars Uber Alles has long struck me as needlessly restrictive, so I am delighted to see this development too.
Even more delighted as it answers the long-time question of manned space travel skeptics, namely, what is there out there that justifies our going and can pay for the effort to do so? The answer is AI data centers and plenty of them.
The transport, power and industrial infrastructure required to realize this goal will, of course, have myriad other uses as well. Most of these would not have been practical if the entire tab for lunar logistics and industrialization needed to pursue them had to be charged entirely to their account. But they can be pursued profitably once said capabilities are at least modestly well-along.
This should be quite the ride.
And only one of several we are about to be served up by Elon both here and in space.
It would have been quite the alternate future history tho to postulate Musk sending armadas to Mars every two years or so. While NASA struggles to get SLS to run an Artemis mission through the Gateway onto the lunar surface in the same time frames. Hilarious actually…
Ultimately I believe this probably gets us to Mars faster.