SpaceX Plans a Permanent Moonbase

by

SpaceX will build a permanently manned moonbase using many lunar Starships.

The Lunar Starship will have landing legs, but no heat shield and no flaps.

The Lunar Starships would only dock with tankers and would not land back on Earth.

SpaceX has increased efforts and planning for a moonbase.

Japanese entrepreneur and billionaire Yusaku Maezawa and the crew of dearMoon will be the first humans Starship will launch, fly around the Moon, and safely return to Earth. Over the course of their weeklong journey, this crew of artists, content creators, and athletes from all around the world will also travel within 200 km of the lunar surface.

24 thoughts on “SpaceX Plans a Permanent Moonbase”

  2. The moon is literally ‘right there’ all the time.
    Colonize the moon first.
    Getting from the moon to anywhere in the solar system is technically much easier than from the Earth’s surface (No atmosphere, and 1/6th gravity).
    Even with today’s technology we could build a lunar space elevator to get to and from the Moon’s surface.
    Exploring Mars is a great idea, but colonize the moon BEFORE colonizing Mars.

  3. Brian, this story is either 3 short incomplete sentences or something is really wrong with your CSS. All I see are ads.
    This why in my previous comment I focused on the previous posters .

  4. The comments here really show a lack of understanding of both space and economics.
    Musk will be sending many trips to the moon. Why? Because it costs lots of money to send cargo anywhere past LEO( though fusion tug combined with inflatable may change that ). But the issue for mars is that we can only send cargo for 6 months out of 24 months. And simple launching to LEO will not cut it.
    IOW, SX will be doing the moon, just like Starlink, to pay for mars.
    This was ALWAYS the situation. So ppl trying to rip on Musk for having brains and drive, are only showing their lack of both.

  5. I’ve often wondered if Musk is not really telling us his real plans. An example, he never really talked so much about an earth satellite system, but after he had the rockets to do so, boom, he moved very fast on this. Now I personally think going to Mars is fine but a waste of time for long term living in space. Habitats make so much more sense with materials from the moon or asteroids. My inside joke is that Musk is a “planetary chauvinist”. As soon as Musk proves starship…maybe then he goes all out after asteroids. But he doesn’t want others to pursue the same, so he says Mars is it. A tiny asteroid is worth an astounding fortune. Even if the materials flood the market at just raw steel prices, it would still be a fortune.

    I would say if starship works as planned, we will know if I’m right about this in less than 2 years.

    • I agree. It makes far more sense to go for the asteroids. Don’t go down another gravity well. Replacing the Starship Raptor engines with the planned nuclear option would be game-changing.

    • The truth is, he hasn’t reached the point in his plans where he has to decide between Mars and O’Neill colonies. Everything he has done to date is equally applicable to both, and Mars makes a good placeholder goal until he has to decide.

      The key issue driving the choice between them is human partial gravity tolerance. We know that zero gravity is bad for your health, really bad. We know that people can successfully live and reproduce at 1g. What we don’t know is what the curve looks like between those two points.

      Once Starship is flying, it becomes quite economical to place a rotating partial gravity lab in orbit, and do the tests to find out the health consequences of partial gravity. Just outfit a couple of Starships as living quarters with the relevant diagnostic equipment, send them up, and have them spin about each other bolo style, weighted so that one experiences lunar gravity, and one experiences Martian gravity. A couple years later you’ll know if Mars is a feasible colonization target, and he can change his plans without any wasted effort if the answer is “no”.

  6. Im definitely in the moon first camp. We have so much to learn about living on an alien world. And so much industrial capacity to learn to build and maintain. It simply doesn’t make sense to add in the risk of going so deep into space until we develop a lot of new capability. In space fuel depots, resource extraction from moon surface, habitats, growing food, studies on long term low gravity effects, robotics, automation, health care, etc. the list goes on. Much easier to perfect this all on a body that is 1 second away vs 12 light minutes!

  8. Most Excellent!

    Been explaining to my kids how lunar tourism will work so good to see the first steps taking place. Son is already planning on moving to the moon later in life.

  9. At last, someone is planning to go back to the moon, and stay there! I’m delighted it’s an American company. (for nationalistic and economic reasons). I never understood Elon Musk’s “Mars fetish”. The moon is the gateway to the solar system, it’s quite close and we know how to get there. It’s close enough so persons don’t experience the significant risks of prolong exposure to microgravity and solar/cosmic radiation.

    And it reeks of raw materials (even water! The most precious resource for sustainable space travel). Whoever gets there and most importantly stays there owns it. Or whatever chunk they occupy. I see a possible future conflict here in this “reality”, but that’s for another discussion. We have to reliably get to and from the moon, live there long term, and harvest it’s raw materials if we have any hope of moving en mass into the solar system and beyond.

    The hell w/Mars. Of course we’ll get people there eventually. But it will be so much easier, and less death defying if we first get back to the moon, and learn how to stick around.

    • I completely agree. The Moon is not only FAR closer, it is actually FAR closer all the time, whereas Mars has to be “aligned” every 2 years or so, meaning that once someone gets to Mars, they have to wait 2 YEARS to fly back. Without a robust habitat already in place and running, humans will die on Mars while waiting. And we are nowhere near to having robots with AI who can build a human habitable base for 2+ years (we’d need to reuse it for the next crew too). Even the ISS needs constant work to keep it habitable, and that’s in LEO and has been reachable in a few hours for decades.
      The Moon takes a few days to reach – less maybe with newer tech.
      Mars will be more practical to reach with the new fusion drives probably coming on line by 2030, after which the SpaceX so-called Starship will seem like old EVs that needed to be recharged every 100 miles. There’s no practical way to do that either: refueling a Starship, then refueling the refuelers etc. etc. Chemical rockets have about reached their peak use and will decline soon. Starship might have some limited use setting up a Moon colony, but even that will require refueling in LEO and maybe the Moon too, something which has barely been thought of yet, let alone been practiced to the point where it’s trustworthy enough to include human beings.
      Oh, and Starships have just blown up and never achieved orbit so far. I now believe Artemis will be first on the Moon with astronauts: https://www.space.com/nasa-artemis-3-plant-growth-experiment-moon, unless China beats us there first, a real possibility. Even fusion rockets may beat SpaceX.

      • Nowhere near? I’m pretty sure Musk’s other company Tesla are building very advanced robots in Optimus and they’re also making big strides in AI.

        • Taking a few planned steps in on a smooth factory floor and doing trivial car body checks is nowhere near working on the wildly temperature-ranging uneven rocky/dusty surface of the Moon, with its glass shard-like rocks never worn down by wind or water (a problem even with NASA spacesuits). Whatever machines eventually help build a habitat on the Moon won’t be human-like for the most part, if any. They’ll have to be much more robust and hold a charge longer too. Fortunately, 1/6 gravity will help, but that’s about it. Everything else about the Moon is hostile to life or machine.
          I’ll be more convinced convinced when robots independently build an airtight building in Antarctica, then do it again in the Sahara desert, charging themselves along the way.

      • At the moment the plan is to use starship to take astronauts off of the surface of the moon. Artemis will be what takes the astronauts and cargo from earth to the moon.

        By 2030 starship probably won’t be old tech, remember it’s currently 2024 and a prototype, not 2016 and already finished. Star ship is also comparable to nasa’s SLS and it’s reusable, this is one of, if not the most advanced rockets ever built. By the time 2030 comes along, starship will have likely received some small updates to its design or there might possibly end up being another version of starship at that point. By the mid or late 2030’s there will very likely then be an entire new version of starship as well as other reusable rockets being designed.

      • No need to refuel and recharge cause nuclear reacter may work for several years, so the possibility is in hand.

      • 1) NONE of the starships were intended to go Orbit, any more than saying that you are a loser for not going to the bottom of the ocean when you take a bath.
        2) Numerous ppl have bet that: SX would not have F1 succeed; that F9 would not succeed in launching; that F9 would never land; that F9 would not be reusable; that FH would never launch; that dragon would never work; that spacex would never be profitable.
        3) numerous ppl/entities have lost BILLIONS shorting Tesla with the exact same thought process as you .
        4) SX is the main lander for Artemis so only way for Artemis to ‘beat’ SX to the moon is if BO actually delivers the same way that SX delivers, and not how BO has delivered everything to date.

      • Maybe when Bezos has actually put something in orbit, it will be worth caring what he wants.

Comments are closed.