SpaceX and Elon Musk are choosing to go to the moon. The moon orbiting and moon landing missions should be within this decade and they will make a permanently manned moonbase as well.
In the video, I describe the multiple moon related missions that SpaceX has and how easy it would be for SpaceX to make a moonbase much larger than the international space station.
Just leaving one Lunar Starship on the moon would provide lots of room for moonbase astronauts.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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Only castaways convert their boats into habitats. When the Starship lunar cargo transportation system becomes fully reusable, it will be cheaper, easier and better to use it to deliver pre-built inflatable modules, deploy, inflate and interconnect.
If they want the Starships horizontal, why not just land them horizontally? Slap some engines along the sides, eat the cosine losses (depending on where the engines are mounted), and dispense with the silly anchors and cables.
Know what’s a great idea? A weighted suit that makes it feel your moving on Earth, when your on the moon. Why? We know how to “move” on Earth. That “common knowledge” is actually very important to a bunch of people trying to work together. Second, lower gravity then Earth may be very detrimental to human health over some period of time. We don’t know what that threshold of “lower gravity” is. We DO know, people in micro-gravity (essentially zero G) after two weeks suffer medical damage from bone demineralization, mussel atrophy, and we’ve recently discovered, immune and neurological damage.
We now know zero-G is over a very short time, bad for any persons health. How “little G” over what time isn’t? We have no idea. I would design clothing that added and distributed weight that made you (and your body) feel you were on Earth when on the moon. I know materials and biomechanics.
Know what I know about fashion? I know I should wear cloths. Ever see me naked? you’d scream “put something, ANYTHING on now!” Ugly but true.
With moon gravity at 1/6 of earth gravity, a useful 25 kg exercise back pack, would have to be 150 kg, there might be a volume issue. Perhaps a tight suit containing ferrous thread, and a work area with a magnetic floor would simulate gravity, and not require wasting time for specific exercise??
A weighted suit or backpack has smaller acceleration but the inertia is the same.
For example if you fall with 150kg backpack, the inertia of it would be enough to break ribs, despite the slower speed.
Not only that, but simply moving with 150kg backpack, no matter the weight (mass vs gravitational acceleration), due to inertia, would be VERY VERY difficult as each step would require you to change the direction of motion of 150 kg of mass.
I believe they’ve been testing something on the ISS where you exercise on a treadmill with elastic straps to increase the loading on your joints to Earth normal.
The problem is that the effects of zero gravity actually seem to work right down to the cellular level, they’re not just a product of your muscles not seeing enough load.
Please don’t put some garbage encampment like the Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station there. You could easily get 1 million people to sell their houses to have a long weekend on the moon with a bit of comfort and activity – that’s $1T over a half-decade; at a 5,000 person facility, 95% underground – cruise ship style accomodations with surface excursions.
“Long weekend on The Moon” is
| 0.5 day – lift-off to Lunar Transfer point
| 3.3 day – LTO to Luna
| 0.5 day – Luna to surface
| 7.0 day – very long weekend visit
| 0.5 day – surface to Earth-Transfer orbit
| 2.9 day – Luna to Earth
| 0.2 day – touchdown
| 0.5 day – recovery, decontamination, drinks, a good shower and shave.
15.4 days. In reality, something like 12 to 18 days, since I was just estimating all that. The 3.3 day and 2.9 return were derived from Apollo 11. More power gets you there quicker, but requires more power to stop, and more return-power energy. Costly.
Though viewed by many as “hopelessly outdated”, the Apollo missions very much vignetted the energy-cost of doing a dirt-to-Luna-to-Ocean return mission. Apollo was HUGE. I’m not sure that the future Luna missions will have a much different overall energy budget. It certainly isn’t the presence or absence of a lunar rover payload that changes much.
Likewise, I kind of doubt that there’d be many people who’d “sell their houses” to go cavorting around on Luna for a week: While we definitely could set up a supply-chain to get Cruise Ship accommodations and vittles onto Luna’s surface, it really isn’t clear that the profitized round-trip fits in a commonplace upper-middle-class house, turned to cash.
Also … don’t you think that it might be substantially off-putting to handle a round-trip survival probability dropping below 98%? Sell your house, AND there’s a one-in–50 chance you’ll burn up, or suffer a vacuum asphyxiation, or misfire-and-crash, or some other mishap. Might be hard to get takers, Jer.
⋅-⋅-⋅ Just saying, ⋅-⋅-⋅
⋅-=≡ GoatGuy ✓ ≡=-⋅
“…doubt that there’d be many people who’d “sell their houses” to go cavorting around on Luna…”
I would be willing to bet a very nice bottle of wine, a rather sumptuous hunk of fine quality smelly-cheese, and a platter of expensive hors d’ouevres that there would be a waiting list of way over a million ‘takers’ at nearly $1M per pop, based on a 1% non-refundable deposit 10 years in advance for a list to be one of the first million luna tourists for said 12 to 18 days (though i think closer to 8 to 12 for a 4/5-day surface portion) over a 5 to 10-year period sometime likely not too long after 2035.
Why? Too much money and many very risk-tolerant/bored people. So, there are getting-close to 150M homes in the US, close to a quarter of which have near to a $1M in now equity, same for europe, and probably close to half of that and half the equity in Asia. So say 1-in-300 to 1-in-500 of these who are also over 50, empty-nesters, and have an extensive traveling history. These include nearly a quarter-of-a-million who have cruised to Antarctica in the last quarter-century, double that to base camp at Everest (though well under 10k to the summit), the big deserts and jungles of the World have had many million of bush-whackers/dune-wranglers. People are nuts, have too much time and money, and for the most part are adrenaline/look-at-me junkies. It’s getting the 500 to 900 people per day up there in 5 to 10+ ships and all the transitional stays that might be the ‘bottleneck’. Cheers and let the race begin.
I am not convinced that horizontal Starship is the best option. If Starship can be accurately guided to the “chopsticks” with earth gravity? Then a second Starship should be able to land very close to the first vertical Starship. Continuing this pattern until there are 7 vertical Starships in a typical cable arrangement. This should enable at least a 10 to 12 floor “building” interconnecting the 7 vertical segments. Obviously this does make shielding a bigger issue.
Second, without the Starship, what are the “inefficient” dynamics of getting a booster to orbit? Or maybe a dozen for a circular rotating space station near earth, this experience could be useful for building a similar gravity station near the moon, to avoid cycling people to earth. Perhaps getting to the moon ASAP, and the orbital space station later?
A moon base Elon? Watching too many Space: 1999 episodes?
Putting a base on the moon would be good practice for Mars.
Replace “good” with “critically necessary”, and then we agree.
What is the business plan? Elon ran flat out of EV suckers. How will he contrive a profitable moon business?
Mining helium 3. It’s been the plan since the 70’s.
Helium 3 can be made by producing tritium from neutron irradiation of lithium then allowing it to decay to He3 at 5% per year (12 year half-life). Requires building specialized reactors but much much cheaper than extracting the He3 that is uniformly distributed over the moon at less than a part per billion.
NASA awarded SpaceX a few billion to get them to the moon. So pretty damn obvious SpaceX is gonna go to the moon.
Go back in your cave Elon hating troll.
Why? Why are they not immediately planning to use lunar lava caves?
HUGE (as in you could easily put an entire city them) caverns that already offer protection from harsh space. Smooth out the walls and ceiling, seal off a large section and fill with air to allow for easy colonization.
Good to do eventually.
However, are there any lava tube caves near deposits of frozen volatiles?
If all the lunar deposits of something valuable are far from any lava tube caves, then a habitat with lunar regolith piled on it will be needed for that mining base.
They’re not conveniently located near the ice deposits, I guess.
2030?
Don’t worry, there always will be a ‘eco’-blocker, pushing any new project 10 years out.
In my humble opinion: Why not divide the “thrusters for landing” ring in two, one side in an upper and the other half in the lower, both at th same side, to do the landing in horizontal position directly? It will be more difficult to do the stevedoring, but it will be simplify a lot the poitioning on the moon surface…
Because the point of putting them in a ring near the top of the rocket was to keep them away from the ground, so that the exhaust wouldn’t throw loose regolith all over the place? Which point is totally defeated if they did as you propose.
Also, of course, everything is loaded with the rocket standing upright, so you might have problems with cargo shifting if you landed in any other orientation, and avoiding that would make things more complicated and heavy. And the rocket is structurally strongest against vertical loads.
China plans to “land astronauts on the moon by 2030. And on Wednesday (July 12), we got a bit of information about how they plan to do it, courtesy of a China Manned Space Agency engineer.
The mission concept involves two rocket launches, according to Reuters, which cited Chinese state media coverage of the engineer’s presentation at a space conference in the city of Wuhan. One of those launches will loft a lunar lander, and the other will send astronauts skyward.” – https://www.space.com/china-astronauts-moon-landing-2030-plan
WTH has happened to this country? In the 1960s, competition from Russia galvanized a whole generation to get to the Moon first, from the president to all school children. No personal computers, smartphones or internet then, but somehow we did it by 1969!
Now, I doubt even 1% of Americans know China plans a permanent colony on the Moon by the 2030s, and given they are the world’s manufacturers and they mostly accomplish anything they put their collective minds to, they’ll probably do it. Does any American care? Nah, we’re too busy trying to tell which is worse: a divided and dysfunctional government, or the people trying to overthrow it and democracy.
We have one fully qualified moon-capable rocket already, and a second, fully reusable one deep into development. Plus another super heavy (New Glenn) getting ready to come online. China has PowerPoint presentations. We’re so far ahead they can’t even see us. I’m sure that, sometime in the 2030s, they’ll manage to put a couple of guys on the moon with an Apollo-style flags-and-footprints mission. But they may need a American passport to land.
The U.S. has one moon-capable rocket online, with a second, fully reusable one that’s deep in flight testing. And there’s another super heavy (New Glenn) ramping toward flight operations. China has PowerPoint presentations and press releases. We’re so far ahead they can’t even see us.
As much as I want Space X to go to Mars right away, Moon base makes more sense. It can be a milestone on the way to Mars: produce propellant for NTP spacecraft and start the journey from the Moon orbit. Not everything has to be a Starship. Moon economy can be a start for Mars economy. Walk before you run.
Who’s going to pay for it?
Starlink subscribers.
A “Permanently” moon base? Well, I guess I should be relieved at this evidence you’re not using AIs to craft your reports yet; In my experience they’re really good at grammar.
Actually, you might consider trying to see if an AI can proof read your content. I bet that would be practical! (Testing… Yes, “co-pilot” does proof reading for grammar.) Serious proposal, your occasional grammar errors look bad, even if they’re really just a superficial problem.
Random remarks:
The graphic of the Starship being laid flat offends the mechanical engineer in me; You really need an intermediate mast at the mid point of the guy lines, or else the load on the cables AND anchorage rises dramatically as the Starship approaches horizontal.
But, keeping in mind SpaceX’s “best part is no part’ philosophy, the Moon landing Starship has a ring of thrusters near the top for landing. It could probably be employed for a controlled tip over maneuver.
I don’t think SpaceX *has to* solve the tile issue, not urgently, anyway; Starship would be cheaper than Falcon even with the upper stage being used in a disposable mode. So they should soon be able to start making money off Starship while working on that problem.
In fact, since you’d anticipate a lot less payload coming down than going up, they actually could have a specialized Starship using heavier heat shielding, maybe transpiration cooled steel, that went up empty, and brought down the loads going that way; That way you could demount and return engines from one way Starship launches, while stockpiling huge amounts of stainless steel in orbit for all sorts of construction projects.
Uncontrolled tipover is probably fine in moon gravity.
Ah, no, not remotely. I think you’re forgetting just how big the Starship is.
Falling 200’ in one sixth g still means hitting the ground at about 45 fps or about 30 mph, which is a pretty dramatic splat on impact.
Unless your a person in the lander that tips over. I guess that when sh** hits the lander….
Correction: In retrospect, they probably do need to solve the heat shield issue for the fuel tenders, at least.
Which means they will eventually stray from the Artemis skit, and do their thing without the Artemis project getting involved.
It will be fun to watch the old space guard faces, when SpaceX announces they are dropping a few HLS on the Moon for their paid customers. And then, taking said customers there and back again.
What is the old “space guard”? Artemis has not yet landed on the moon, and is (very sadly), not likely to do this in their own timeline. I want us to get back to the moon, and stay there. If private enterprise can do it quicker, DO IT!