How SpaceX and NASA Will Colonize The Moon!
We choose to go to the moon. For the first time in 5 decades, humans are setting their sights again on the Moon as a destination for scientific accomplishment. While going to the Moon won’t be easy, we’re fortunate that it won’t be nearly as hard as it was back in the 1960’s. The Apollo missions of the 60’s pushed NASA’s capabilities to the absolute limit. People died in pursuit of the Moon, others barely survived by the skin of their teeth - you ever seen Apollo 11? That movie was crazy. Going to space back in the day was absolutely terrifying. So, if we can resurrect that sheer force of will that got us to the Moon to begin with and combine that with the insane technology that we’re packing in the modern day, and not only will we be going to the Moon, but this time we’ll be conquering the Moon. People will be living on the Moon in this decade and doing so many other things. So, let’s talk about that today.
The Artemis program is the new NASA mission to the Moon that is scheduled to deliver the first astronauts in the year 2024. Yes, we are getting to SpaceX and Elon Musk and our usual fanboy stuff eventually, but NASA are the ones leading the charge here, and that’s pretty damn cool. This is the most ambitious thing that NASA has done in way too damn long. This project was born during the Trump administration, which is… say what you will about him, but the guy loves space. So, with the government finally on board providing the funding that they need, NASA are flexing with the Artemis program.
The first goal post is to land people on the Moon in 2024. The next goal will be to establish an Artemis base camp on the moon by 2028. That means people living and working on the Moon in this decade.
This all starts with the SLS rocket system and the Orion (oh-ryan, as in, “oh my god, it’s ryan seacrest) spacecraft. Now, I know this is an Elon Musk channel, and Elon simps are going to be saying “Why didn’t they use the Falcon Heavy rocket?” Well, the SpaceX Falcon’s are just not strong enough for this particular job. NASA’s SLS - or Space Launch System - rocket will take over the crown as the most powerful rocket booster ever made. All of this is to get the Orion spacecraft into orbit so that it can travel from the Earth to the Moon and back again. Orion can transport up to six people at once, but the plan right now is to send 4 at a time. The first test flight for SLS and Orion is scheduled for November 2021, this will be an uncrewed flight that will accomplish a practical test of the whole system, plus deliver some research satellites into earth orbit. A crewed flight test is hopeful for 2022 that will take Orion to a lunar orbit and back again. And if all goes well, then in 2024 we go to the Moon and touchdown.
Before astronauts reach the Moon’s surface, they first stop off at the Gateway. That’s basically a space station, very similar to the ISS, that will be in orbit around the Moon. Gateway is an international project that involves teams from NASA, Canada, Europe and Japan. The idea is to send the modules of the Gateway up piece by piece over the next couple of years. The whole miniature space station is designed to function autonomously. It will use the Canada Arm version 3 to basically assemble and maintain itself while awaiting the crew. Yeah, I know it’s weird that we named our arm after our own country, it’s a bit extra, but we don’t get a lot of wins up here, let us have this. Sorry. Anyway, with the Gateway established, that will be a docking point for the Orion spacecraft and a staging ground for the astronauts. Only 2 of them get to make the trip down to the lunar surface, the other two Artemis members will just hang out in the Gateway.
This is where SpaceX joins the party. Transporting astronauts from lunar orbit, down to the surface and back up again will be done by a SpaceX Starship vehicle. This is a modified version of the original Starship design that SpeX has been developing with NASA to meet the specific needs of a human landing system for the Moon. SpaceX beat out Blue Origin and Dynetics to win this major contract with NASA, that is valued at 2 point 9 billion dollars. The Moon lander Starship will take off from Earth on the Super Heavy booster with no crew and it will fly to lunar orbit, where it just waits for the astronauts to arrive. In theory the Starship will just remain out there and can be reused as a ferry multiple times over. The two people who land on the Moon will remain there for one week, doing experiments, exploring the surface and living in the Starship. After that, they head back up to the Gateway and everyone returns to Earth in the Orion capsule. NASA are using the old ways for this, the Orion isn’t landing on Earth, it’s just going to release a capsule that will fall down and parachute into the ocean.
Now, let’s address the Elon simps again, because I know what you’re saying - this could all be accomplished with just one SpaceX Starship and NASA’s plan is incredibly wasteful and over complicated. And yeah, in theory, that’s absolutely true. The only part of the whole Orion system that actually comes back is the crew capsule, everything else is wasted. NASA SLS rockets can’t land themselves, they’re not reusable. And that’s unfortunate, it’s not the ideal way to do this. But, we’ve got to remember that NASA started this plan 5 years ago, SpaceX did not have the proven track record back then that they do now, NASA couldn’t just assume that SpaceX would deliver on all the things that they promised to achieve. So they went ahead and designed this program according to how NASA does things. This is the first chance they’ve had to make anything really exciting in decades, just let them have this one. I’m sure we’ll get independent Starship flights from the Earth to the Moon in the very near future. This is all the very early days of a long term Moon based colonization program that is going to span decades.
Quick interruption here to invite you all to subscribe to our weekly Tesla Space newsletter, we deliver all the updates on Tesla, SpaceX, Elon Musk and of course Neuralink in a quick, fun and easy to read package. Link to sign up is in the description below, it’s the tesla space dot com. Once you sign up be sure to check your promotions tab to make sure our emails are going to your main inbox!
Alright, so we’re on the Moon. Now what? Well, NASA wants to establish an Artemis basecamp on the surface, and send new teams of astronauts up once per year to develop and expand the project. But they’re not the only ones with this idea. China and Russia have announced a joint venture to establish their own Moon base. Obviously, they’re not going to tell us exactly what they have in mind for this particular mission. We do know that China was able to land a probe on the dark side of the Moon a couple of years back, so they are serious about this as well.
What would be the point of colonizing the Moon anyway? This is where everything gets super speculative, so don’t take any of this part too seriously. So, obviously there is still a lot that we don’t know about the Moon and what’s up there, a lot of NASA’s mission is based on just doing experiments, making new discoveries, and hopefully learning new things about what goes on in space outside of Earth’s atmosphere. There’s a lot of science to be done. But there are other reasons we might want to be on the Moon, and a big one is resources. In the past, we assumed that the Moon was a big, dead chunk of rock. But we now know that there is more to it. There is a lot of very useful stuff up there, so mining on the Moon could become a whole new industry in the future. For one, there is water on the Moon. It’s frozen solid in the bottom of craters that are in permanent shade from the sun. And if there’s water, that means there’s hydrogen and oxygen. This would be a key in a moon based settlement, if we can source water and breathable air on site. Then there are a ton of useful elements on the Moon that we already know of. Helium 3 is a big one, this is extremely rare on Earth, but it’s present on the Moon. Helium 3 can be used in the energy sector for things like nuclear fusion. Helium 3 could become the power source for life on the Moon and it could be incredibly useful for energy here on Earth as well. We also know that the Moon contains silicon, iron, magnesium, aluminium, manganese and titanium.
Coincidentally, a lot of the metals that we’ve found on the Moon are very important for the production of our modern electronic devices, particularly batteries - and that’s a very big deal. So, as much as this is about science and exploration right now. I would expect that the long term plan for the Moon is going to be about resource extraction. And that’s pretty amazing. It’s such an opportunity to be able to mine on the Moon. If we can shift resource extraction off of the Earth and stop messing up our environment here, that could save us as a civilization. The Moon is just a big chunk of rock, we can mine and extract resources from it all we want, there’s nothing there to screw up the way that we’ve been screwing up our own planet.
