61 thoughts on “Elon’s Mars To Moon Pivot”

  1. 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.

  2. 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…

    1. It may also give us a quick interim answer to a very fundamental question, viz. “Can human beings survive long-term in a reduced gravity environment?” It would be great if all of the deleterious effects of zero G went away in the 1/6 gravity of the Moon. Then we wouldn’t have to worry about the 0.38 G of Mars. I have no idea whether that would happen, but even if it didn’t, we would at least have three points with which to draw a curve, instead of the current two.

      1. Not to mention that any low-g disease that appears that could be treated by a return to 1G can be accomplished in days not months (at best). This could be mitigated by artifical gravity to some degree if the disease is not chronic or requires a permanent return to a 1G environment. But you’d have to be prepared for it.

        It’d be helpful to know if any disease curve is linear or otherwise. Hard to establish even with 3 data points. But hey if nothing strange develops at 1/6G that could bode well for 1/3+G.

        If things do show up that are treatable with medication, fine.
        If not, your time in space, like working around a live nuclear reactor inside its containment, might be limited. If that time threshold exceeds the transit times to Mars after a surface stay, well SOL (the acronym not the alternate name for our star).

        The next step might be genetic engineering to acclimate space people in non-Darwinian time-frames. Or put up with shorter life expectancies on Mars until Darwin kicks in for your offspring’s nth offspring. Or maybe wait until a way is figured out to transfer one’s conscious mind to a robot. Or less wait until they figure out how to train an AI to be exactly like you and send that as a robot. Very generous of you but hardly satisfying I’d think.

        The reduced life expectancy on the frontier wasn’t viewed as a negative among the pioneers. An outlook on life exceedingly rare these days. A good way to weed out the pioneer from the dilettante…

        As someone once noted somewhere: Safe is not an option.

        1. I refer folks to the earliest episodes of the TV series Gunsmoke. The dudes that appear in Dodge City just off the train from Chicago vs. the locals…

        2. A race between the pioneer and the socialcrat who believes your physical well-being is a societal duty and therefore sees an obligation to outlaw risky behavior…

  3. 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.

    1. 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…

      1. This. I was sort of looking forward to it. At one point, years ago, I was hoping for Amazon Moon and SpaceX Mars. And, as always, wishing I were enough younger to go. I have skills that would be useful either place. But I’m 75… PSL years ago, I did convince Jerry Pournelle that the place for data centers was the Moon,

      2. The armadas will still be going to Mars, but the first one with humans along for the ride will be departing in the early 2030s, not the late 2020s. With much of the infrastructure needed for the Moon project also being dual-use anent Mars, the initial human-crewed armada will probably be quite a bit larger than originally planned.

          2. I’m 74 myself so that is certainly a consideration for me as well. Live forever or die trying I always say.

            There’s a story about a judge handing a 50-year sentence to a man in his 60s. “I can’t do 50 years,” the man objected. “Well, just do the best you can,” the judge replied.

    1. How so? In Elon’s post he describes continuing to go to Mars with crew in 5-7 years. If cargo succeeds in 2029 then crew in 5 years from now. If cargo fails in 2029 but succeeds in 2031 then crew in 7 years from now. So, that still is the fastest way of sending crew to Mars whether the Moon is there or not.

    2. Very well could be. All the problems people haven’t considered or encountered will pop up and get fixed, meaning less delays had they stayed strictly on the Mars course.

  5. I’m actually relieved for Mars as a result of this bringing up the Moon as a priority. I have long been concerned that leftist activists will try to stop SpaceX’s efforts to go to Mars by agitating the forward and back contamination issues. By accomplishing lunar missions in support of the government and by making progress on lunar development where the environmental arguments are inherently weak, attention about what Elon is doing towards Mars will be redirected to what he is doing on the Moon and I don’t think the resistance will succeed there. When SpaceX starts landing cargo on Mars in 2029, Starship will be more mature and hence more likely to work the first time. So there will be less time for the left to organize and the attention may be directed against the great wealth he is making with LEO and the Moon.

  6. Musk deserves a lot of credit for being able to adapt his plans, even if it means deferring his primary goal, to take advantage of changing circumstances.

    Yes, it gives starship something to do between launch seasons. It self funds the next stage of operations, similar to starlink. It avoids terrestrial lawfare over land use issues, trading them for others. It ensures a successful American presence on the Moon while allowing for more rapid iteration of technologies that will help on Mars.

    I think this announcement is all of those things but mainly signals focusing scarce resources on the near term requirement of fulfilling the HLS contract.

    A lot of people took this as abandoning Mars, which it obviously isn’t. Musk is building out a juggernaut of production and launch capacity and needs something to aim it at. Then when the season shifts…

  7. I’m surprised nobody is mentioned the rather obvious pivot which is not between Musk going to the moon as opposed to going to Mars it’s the Golden dome/space Force paradigm. Any space borne component of said golden dome you’re talking about laser or particle beam satellites well into the hundreds of tons for that you would need a heavy lift reusable boosters like the starship wedded to the super heavy. That’s the real anchor customer that will enable Musk to do his more ambitious space colonization/Mars colonization goals. It would likely take a massive increase in rocket production capacity to be able to do said aggressive orbital defense against Russian or Chinese hypersonic missiles carrying nukes. Likely contracts for hundreds of billions or trillions of dollars worth of hardware placed in orbit in by SpaceX.

    1. If Golden Dome is to be even minimally deployed by 2028, SpaceX will need to be central to the project. It should, in fact, be the prime contractor for the project. If, for whatever reason, thus does not come to pass, then Golden Dome will be a farce.

      That said, even Golden Dome will be eclipsed by the level of Starship ops needed to support Elon’s Moon project.

      1. “That said, even Golden Dome will be eclipsed by the level of Starship ops needed to support Elon’s Moon project.”

        Perhaps; depending on how ambitious Golden Dome turns out to be. You might need/want lunar bases as support for Golden Dome. Imagine rocket fuel manufactured from frozen volatiles recovered from permanently shadowed craters near the lunar poles. This would create enormous in-space refueling capability. Believe that the late Ben Bova said it only takes a 20th as much energy to move material from the Lunar surface to high Earth orbit as to move said material from Earth to high Earth orbit. The key is who wins the 2028 POTUS election. If it is Republican (Vance or De Santis) Golden Dome would likely continue; if a Democrat wins he/she would likely cancel or merely gut funding turning it into as you suggested “a farce”.

        1. The spaceborne parts of Golden Dome will all be in LEO or even in VLEO so Starship can deliver them all from the ground without any prop refilling in the picture.

          I’m a skeptic about frozen volatiles on the Moon. If they turn out to be there, nice. If not, that would not be a showstopper of any kind. Oxygen will be a by-product of smelting and there will be a lot of smelting going on. In any case, it makes no sense to predicate a military initiative on something that could well not exist.

          But there’s not only no militarily useful reason to establish bases on the Moon, it’s illegal to do so as per the Outer Space Treaty.

          Golden Dome may not wind up having a very long highly useful life anyway. With the shadow fleet now being incrementally whittled away and the Ukrainians continuing their incremental de-industrialization/de-militarization of Russia, that nation could implode as soon as later this year. At whatever point that occurs, NATO spec ops troops will certainly sweep in and confiscate all of the Russian nukes and their makings. The PRC is looking more than a bit wobbly these days too. Once both of those regimes are gone, Golden Dome won’t have much of a job left.

          It will still probably be maintained for decades, of course, as tends to happen with anything military once established. The USAF might even continue flying manned combat aircraft despite there being no real prospect of any future combat with which to involve them.

          1. “I’m a skeptic about frozen volatiles on the Moon. If they turn out to be there, nice..”

            I believe that it is generally conceded that said volatiles exist in permanently shadowed craters near the lunar poles (especially the southern pole) in quantities in the 100’s of millions of tons. However they may or may not turn out to be economically recoverable. I believe most of the sites being discussed for permanent human habitation are in those areas.

            “But there’s not only no militarily useful reason to establish bases on the Moon,”

            The discussed volatiles being extracted from the Moon to make rocket fuel and oxidant for said large Space Force/Golden Dome Satellites.

            “…it’s illegal to do so as per the Outer Space Treaty.”

            Not sure if the treaty would ban NASA from setting up the bases and merely suppling said extracted fuel/oxidant/etc. to a variety of concerns both civilian and military. In other words it wouldn’t be a “military base” per see

          2. “The spaceborne parts of Golden Dome will all be in LEO or even in VLEO so Starship can deliver them all from the ground without any prop refilling in the picture.”

            Large Satellites for say high power directed energy missile defense would no doubt have a limited supply of attitude adjustment fuel. Lunar resources would enable said Satellites and other Space Force assets to be refueled in orbit. The NASA base on the Moon doing such would ostensibly be civilian in structure giving said resources (fuel) to a variety of concerns. And if we don’t build such count on the Chinese doing it (1967 Outer Space Treaty or not.)

          3. “Generally conceded” badly overstates the case for lunar polar volatiles. Something is certainly there, but the exact composition and, especially, the quantity of that something are still very much TBD.

            Golden Dome won’t feature in any of this. Mr. Trump wants at least a Minimum Viable Product version of Golden Dome deployed before he leaves office. That’s Jan 20, 2029. Artemis 3 won’t fly before sometime in 2028 at the earliest. I hope you see the scheduling mismatch here. Golden Dome will be entirely deployed from the Earth, not the Moon.

            And it won’t feature any laser or other directed-energy battle stations. Those have too long a lead-time. The core of the system will be thousands of space-based interceptor missiles, each roughly the size of a typical contemporary long-range air-to-air missile. These will be put into suitable LEO orbits, in small clusters, by Starships – probably the same ones SpaceX will build to deploy V3 Starlink birds and the earliest versions of Elon’s LEO AI data centers in space. These will be accompanied by some ground-based interceptor missiles based in Greenland and, perhaps, northern Canada – THAADs or Standard SM-3s most likely.

            Going beyond a Minimum Viable Product level of deployment will be a simple matter of just putting up more and more clusters of space-based and ground-based interceptors.

            Given the very wobbly nature of both the Russian and PRC regimes, Golden Dome may have a very short useful life. If both of our “peer” opponent nations implode before Trump leaves office – which is a decidedly non-zero probability – it will have no useful life. This would, IMHO, be the best possible outcome. We need missile defenses – and have for decades – because we have enemies with missiles. If those go away, so does the need for missile defense.

            Earth has never seen a time when there was only a single most-consequential nation which had no consequential enemies. I think we are within a few years, at most, of the US being that nation and ushering in a new Golden Age. I’m no longer a young man, but even I might live long enough to see at least the very early stages of that coming Golden Age. But I really want that world for my offspring. That’s why I remain an optimist.

            Elon will be the key to much of this.

      2. It would be wise for SpaceX to avoid being prime for this project. It’s probably going to be a boondoggle. By being a well paid subcontractor, SpaceX gets to cash the checks without taking a huge reputation hit from delivering an ineffective defense.

      1. I had in mind using ammonia as a way to transport nitrogen with the leftovers. It’s hardly even a cryogen and will liquify in very cold climates and freeze in the worst. The only places with abundant nitrogen gas are Earth and Titan, and its requirement as a press rant is important.

    2. IIRC the XLR-99 in the X-15 ran on ammonia and it was said that anyone who did that again was out of his mind.

      1. What was the reason for ammonia in the first place?

        The AI said it was for lower combustion temperature to allow for a reusable/restartable rocket engine with the tech of the day?

        What was the drawback?

        Toxic as in a powerful irritant but still nothing nearly as dangerous as hydrazine.

      2. I have to say, liquid ammonia handling has progressed some in the past 60 years or so. The sayings of those engineers are probably no longer valid. Ammonia was chosen because it has no coking properties, important in a 1960 re-usable engine. It’s a way to use hydrogen without using hydrocarbons, and without the issues of deep cryogens like liquid hydrogen.

          1. Quite so. Nitrogen will be one of the most valuable commodities on the Moon. Ammonia would be a great way to transport it, as it is not really cryogenic, and it is rich in H, another rare item. One thing you don’t need is O, as lunar rocks have lots of that.

        2. My thought was, you could convert tanker ships to run on ammonia so as not to have payload tanks and maybe get 200 tons per launch. But I don’t know how much Isp you could wring out of ammonia.

          1. Jeez, if you need to transport ammonia to the Moon, just transport ammonia to the Moon. There’s no call to be pumping hundreds of tons of nitrogen oxides into Earth’s atmosphere every time you launch a Starship stack.

          3. Capturing and rendering NEO asteroids could provide carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and hydrogen as well as silicon, light metals and other useful stuff. The oxygen and hydrogen could be used to land the other stuff on the lunar surface using Blue Origin reusable hydrolox landers.

            Once Mars has significant industry as well, the Martian atmosphere will be processed in massive quantities for propellant production. But that atmosphere also contains 2.7% nitrogen. Mars could certainly spare some of that for transport to the Moon.

            In the early going, a great deal of the mass needed to support human lunar presence will need to be shipped in from Earth. But in the longer term, extraterrestrial and extralunar sources will be found for anything not naturally present on the Moon in suitable quantities.

  9. If using the moon as a resource for space-based data centers is in the cards, I would not be surprised if people start getting interested in lunar sites near highlands. Lunar anorthite is incredibly pure calcium aluminosilicate, maybe the closest to a pure source of silicon they would find. Lunar regolith is a dog’s breakfast of highland rock, KREEP, and basalt. On Earth, we have lots of very pure silica that formed within granite. Weathering converts the granite feldspars into clay and water action sorts out the quartz. Unfortunately, this mechanism is absent on the Moon. Granite is rare as hen’s teeth there, but prospectors might find some blobs in areas with a lot of KREEP.

    1. Your Glossary Entry for the Day…

      KREEP Explainer via Grok:

      KREEP is a well-known term in lunar geology and geochemistry, referring to a distinctive geochemical component found in certain lunar rocks and materials.

      It is an acronym that stands for:
      K — Potassium (from its chemical symbol K)
      REE — Rare Earth Elements (a group of 17 chemically similar elements, including lanthanides like lanthanum, cerium, neodymium, etc.)
      P — Phosphorus

      In the context of lunar materials, KREEP describes rocks or rock components (such as basalts, breccias, and residual melts) that are significantly enriched in these elements—along with other “incompatible” elements (those that prefer to stay in the melt rather than incorporate into early-forming crystals during magma crystallization). These often include heat-producing radioactive elements like uranium, thorium, and potassium (via ⁴⁰K).

    1. Are you implying that via KREEP it might be possible to obtain fuel for NTR’s not requiring the complexities of launching radioactive materials from Earth?

      1. Not really. Nuclear is so energy dense that it would take a very long time before lunar processing for U or Th would make any sense. I was just pointing out that if you did want to find areas rich in differentiated rocks, you could use gamma ray detectors. Rocks enriched in K, U, Th on the moon are still pretty poor ores.

  11. SpaceX Reveals LARGEST Change in Starship History! Is Mars Canceled?
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i72rl5hEO84

    Mars doesn’t require a 2.1 year delay to get to from Earth.
    By using Venus orbit, the average delay to go to Mars averages about 1 year, but one needs to use more rocket fuel for the trip. Or if one can get rocket fuel in Venus orbit, one can sent people and supplies about every year. And trip time, even if using Venus can total less than 1 year- assuming people traveling to Mars. Or freight can be sent with longer trip times [using less rocket fuel].
    To go to Mars quickly from Earth one needs to use the atmosphere, to brake [though you could also waste rocket fuel].
    Anyways, to have 1 year rather than 2.1 year, one needs rocket fuel at Venus or orbit and to get quicker from Earth to Mars, one need to be able to use atmospheres of Venus and Mars, so as to use less rocket fuel to brake.
    So roughly need a usable heat shield and cheap rocket fuel in lunar orbit, like say $200 per kg.

  12. Long term occupation of either Mars or the Moon will depend on the availability of energy. If only there had been a national space agency that had spent a little money developing a megawatt scale, transportable nuclear power source instead of building a retro-rod moon ship from left overs that should have been relegated to the junk yard or a museum.

    The Moon is in range to be supplied from Earth, at least if you’re SpaceX. Mars is an entirely different proposition.

    1. Most of what is needful on the Moon will quickly enough be supplied from there. The same will be true of Mars.

      1. How many tons of equipment will have to be transported to the Moon before they produce their first solar cell, the first ton of aluminum? I am beyond reading that the existence of some particular element is the same as being able to produce whatever may contain that element.

        The first requirement, but only the first, will be copious amounts of energy.

          1. My point was years of occupation before self sufficiency let alone exportable production. How many more tons to make that aluminum into anything but a lump of metal? How long and how much machinery for the first cwt of potatoes? Every person, more tons of air, food, water, for years.

            On top of that, all the evidence from ISS says that humans will have a limited occupancy time if they ever want to return to 1g or possibly even survive.

          2. I think we could see pilot-scale production of light metals, in the form of rolled sheet, as well as solar cells, on the Moon by the early 2030s. These would be used to increase power generation. Scaling up from there will take longer, of course, but Elon intends his initial million-sat effort at AI data centers in space to be in Earth orbit and launched from Earth in parallel with the growing number of missions aimed at taking industrial mass to the Moon and setting it up and operating it there.

            Not all lunar labor will be done by humans. Most of the outdoor work, I suspect, will be performed by Optimus robots. But there will be significant human presence too. I think large rotating space stations in lunar orbit will be needed as R&R sites for long-term lunar workers.

  13. Musk would be smart to test his Mar colony tech on the Moon, how will Boring machines work in Lunar regolith, and how do you move tons of crust with electric bulldozers? How does the machinery handle so much dust? Will lubrication work in vacuum or (on Mars) near-vacuum? Wouldn’t it be better to get replacement parts in days instead of months? I always thought that the Moon would be a good testing ground for low-gravity tech.

  14. Just looked up ammonia lox rocket fuel.
    Isp significantly lower than methane oxygen, exhaust forms NOx and water and questions about ignition reliability.
    IIRC the XLR99 had issues with combustion instability because of the ammonia.
    Horrible.

    1. Correct-a-mundo. The late Scott Crossfield could tell an interesting story about the combustion instability of ammonia.

Comments are closed.