Glory to the American empire.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Mars_Colonization_Program
Generally all great empires are a continuation of previous empires.
The Greek empire continued in the form of the Roman empire, the roman empire broke apart with one part taken over by various European tribes and the other continuing as the Byzantine empire.
The European tribes managed to grow enough as to go to the US and mix their genetics together there and form the next greatest empire in the world.
Now, the US being the greatest current empire in the world, the next great empire will be an obvious continuation of the US empire.
The US does not intend to take over any further land on Earth, so where does it go? To the moon of course.
It's free real estate, and only the US has the technology to access it and keep it.
The total area of the moon is 38 million square kilometers. Which is surprisingly a little smaller than the total land area of Asia.
The US is expected to set up a moon base before 2030.
China is the only country with plans to set up a moon base by 2035.
The new age of exploration is the race to colonize the moon.
If the US successfully colonizes the moon, and China fails to do so, and the US successfully manages to mine the moon, that would secure prosperity for their empire for generations to come.
The US is obviously going to successfully do it.
China is less likely to pull it off, as they are trying to set up a moon base in collaboration with Russia, which clearly does not have the competency to be able to pull off a project this big in scope and ambition.
In conclusion:
The US is going to take over the moon within this century.
Glory to the US.
The next stage of white flight is upon us.
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Starship successfully launched and landed.
Starship is supposed to lower per pound transportation costs to about 90-100 USD per lb.
Initial cost of Starship launches is expected to be 10-20 million USD.
Starship could transport around 100-150 tons of equipment per trip which would mean a total transportation cost of 20-40 million for a round trip excluding all additional expenses such as infrastructure and driver salary.
Now the Helium 3 on the moon is supposed to be worth 4 billion USD per ton.
Assuming that Starship is only able to acquire 10 tons per trip at worst case scenario, starship would be bringing back 40 Billion dollars worth of raw resources to Earth at the cost of 40 million dollars for transportation.
That's 100x profit in a delusional worst case scenario.
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The problem is that there's not a single commercial Fusion reactor so Helium-3 can be used, all current reactors are experimental and without major engineering breakthroughs we're still decades away from achieving commercially viable fusion.
In the short and medium-term Lunar resources will be used in-situ to build a permanent outpost.
I still think the Blue Moon lander is gonna make it before Starship in the HLS race, not because Blue Origin has an amazing deadline record, but because it has a much simpler architecture and requires fewer launches. It would be awesome if SpaceX pulls it out before 2030 though
!ifrickinglovescience !spacechads
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Has SpaceX elaborated at all on their moon plans with any detail? I'm assuming they're not planning on literally landing a SpaceShip there and relaunching it. Presumably they'd have a different rocket designed specifically for Lunar landing/takeoff, perhaps even enclosed in a SpaceShip (basically lifting it to either Earth or Lunar orbit as cargo), but I don't recall seeing anything about it.
Or maybe they largely skip the moon and just aim for Mars. After all, I think in-situ fuel generation is much easier on Mars, and I suspect building out a base there would be easier as well (there's actual gravity, and an atmosphere, albeit thin) - the real trouble is just that it's so far.
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No, that's literally their plan
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_HLS
It will take 10 launches because of refueling, very complex architecture.
Not to mention life support systems development, they have nothing of the sort yet for starship, I don't think this thing will fly before 2030.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Moon_(spacecraft)
Here's the Blue Moon concept. Both SpaceX and Blue Origin already won the NASA contracts for the landers. The Mark I version of Blue Moon is still set for launch next year, uncrewed of course.
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That's... ambitious. So basically they still wouldn't have a manned SuperHeavy/StarShip launch anyways, and they'd launch the crew on a Dragon, have them transfer from Dragon to StarShip, land StarShip on the moon, have fun, launch StarShip from the moon, transfer back to Dragon, then finally go back to Earth?
Just seems so odd to me, considering the insane size difference between StarShip and Dragon.
Hopefully if they do this craziness, they can at least have a really, REALLY souped up rover. I mean with all the cargo capacity of StarShip they should be able to fit a fricking mobile science truck on it.
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Not Dragon, the Dragon will never leave LEO, it wasn't designed for that. They'll use SLS and the Orion capsule, it was designed specifically for deep space and NASA wants to use it as they already spent 40 billion dollars on the SLS/Orion program.
Next year will mark the first crewed launch of Orion, Artemis 2.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_2
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Oh mb got them mixed up.
Still really weird. StarShip was designed to accommodate literally dozens of crew/passengers. But they can only fit 4 in Orion.
That's like if you chartered a whole bus to take you to another city, but restricted yourself to whoever can fit in your sedan to drive to the bus station.
Is the primary concern that they don't want any crew about StarShip at launch? I thought the entire purpose of it was to send large crews to space. Or is this just NASA being r-slurred bc they already wasted a spent a ton of $$$ and want to prove it was useful?
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Starship will have no escape system and Elon himself said it would take 100-200 continuous successful flights before putting people on it, that could take years, the HLS is not an issue because it's not going to launch with humans. NASA is risk adverse and then there's the SLS, Congress will not cancel it and NASA is require to use it. SLS/Orion is pretty much a jobs program, a way to keep people who worked in the Shuttle Program employed, it is no wonder the SLS is made of heritage Shuttle components.
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I am fully team SpaceX on this one.
Even if the mining bit doesn't work out with the Helium 3, setting a moon base and starting off the next space race proper sets the US up to start chasing after meteors passing by which are still worth quintillions of dollars worth or resources just flying by.
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Yeah but there isn't like a giant hole on the moon that says "Helium 3 depot"
You still have to break it out of the regolith
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oh wow. So they have to mine it.
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