A quick note collating a list of blogs I’ve written on the topic. I’ll update it with good third party write ups as I become aware of them.
Context: SpaceX announced a refocus on lunar development. My best explanation for this is that SpaceX wants to accelerate human occupation of space which, requiring enormous resources to sustain, means accelerating capitalism in space. Five years ago, building a city on Mars was conceived as a philanthropic venture and the best a market could offer was a set of tools to maximize the utility of each marginal tonne of cargo upmass. Today, exploding demand for power-intensive AI applications provides enough of an upside to justify producing components in space, providing the economic engine necessary to justify and fund the trillions of dollars necessary to build and sustain space factories.
The High Frontier: A Technical Critique. Gerry O’Neill’s 1976 far sighted classic imagines the MVP space colony supported by a (not yet launched) Space Shuttle, adequate to bootstrap the sci-fi future we all want. Just one problem: The economic “anchor tenant” was to be space-based solar power, and Space-based solar power is not a thing. Generating solar power in space to beam to Earth to compete with ground-based solar, gas combined cycle, etc, is “out of the money” by a factor of about 100 million.
In fact Starlink, a constellation of about 10,000 satellites with a combined power generation capacity in the 100s of MW, shows exactly how all viable space-based economic systems work. Send microwaves to Earth-based receivers containing not raw power, but sufficiently valuable binary bits of information. Typically, this is Earth observation data (eg Planet, Umbra) or telecommunication data (eg Starlink). It turns out that the economic value of a received Watt of Starlink microwave power is about a billion times higher than the marginal value of a Watt of electrical power, and so Starlink actually makes money. A lot of money – currently about $10b per year and growing.
The economics of orbital “datacenters” or essentially glorified Starlink satellites with a bunch of GPUs attached are likely to be even better than Starlink. Why? Because the value of a byte containing an inference token from some AGI is much higher than the value of a byte containing some error correction on a P frame of your TicTok video. Taking early 2026 data, the economic utility (price) of inference could easily be 100x the cost for ground-based datacenters. Ignoring the rapidly stiffening elasticity of land supply for solar-powered datacenters on the ground, space-based inference might cost twice as much as ground-based, but that still leaves 98% margin for profit. In other words, those of us who have been looking toward the growing maturity of the fully re-usable Starship for some time and wondering just how much demand it could possibly induce can rest easy: We’re unlikely to saturate our demand for intelligence and like Falcon and Starlink, Starship and orbital inference will print money. Some more details are spelled out in this post: Direct current data centers.
So far so good, but what is the limiting factor? Starlink is currently about 200 MW. Starship can lift orbital power generation to about 100 GW with perhaps 10,000 launches per year, or about one per hour. To go much beyond this, most of the satellite mass needs to be produced in space. The Gerry O’Neill concept calls for the extraction and possible refining of raw material on the Moon, its launch into cis-Lunar space with mass drivers (vintage O’Neill video!), and final processing and assembly in large orbital space stations. Much less than 1% of the final satellite mass is GPUs, so they could be conceivably imported from Earth for many years to come.
The advantage of processing in space is that unlike the Moon, a factory in space will have power 24/7/365, while most of the Moon is shaded for two weeks at a time during the lunar night. Converting the Moon’s crust (lots of alumino-silicates, fortunately) into aluminum and silicon is a power-intensive process.
Here are my notes on Starship Moon Base Design Principles. The short version is: avoid excavation and construction as much as possible.
No matter what, the Lunar base will still need plenty of power to run life support, crush rocks, and shoot them into space. I’ve written two posts on Lunar power. The first (Powering the Lunar base) looked at the challenge of providing consistent power using conventional methods throughout the Lunar day and night, even in polar areas where a few mountains get a bit more sun throughout the year. The second examines Powering the Lunar base with Earth-based microwaves. Not everyone agrees with me but I think the math is quite clear – beaming power from Earth-based power plants to the Moon is 1000x cheaper and much faster than the next cheapest option, and allows what cargo mass we do send up to be focused on production of ores, not operation of finicky and labor-intensive power plants.
Here are a few posts on operations with Starship. Long duration propellant stability in Starship. Lunar Starship and unnecessary operational complexity calculates all the “gear ratios” for transporting mass to and from the Moon using Starship with all the different orbits and engine combinations you could possibly want.
This leaves one final area of discussion: What about NASA?
I wrote Artemis can succeed using Starship around the time of the Human Landing System (HLS) award, pointing out that Starship (or a sufficiently capable Blue Moon system) routes around the damage of NASA’s default architecture, rendering SLS, Orion, and the Lunar Gateway redundant and thus enabling their speedy deletion from the critical path.
This is not a purely academic matter. In NASA is Worth Saving, I argued that NASA’s fundamental mission is to preserve the light of freedom for the future of humanity, a message that’s often lost beneath parochial and mundane concerns which continually erode NASA’s operational capacity.
Regarding NASA’s default architecture of SLS and Orion, which promise to cost $100b and land zero people on the Moon without the HLS contractors, I have written: SLS: Is Cancellation Too Good, SLS is still a national disgrace, and NASA’s Orion Space Capsule is Flaming Garbage. At the time of writing we stand on the cusp of NASA’s attempt to fly four humans around the Moon on Artemis II, a mission all but certain to generate entirely new classes of agonizingly embarrassing and hopefully not tragic system failures for hapless program managers to attempt to excuse and explain away with such phrases as “within the family of expected outcomes” and “it’s a learning process”. That is, if we can shift the goalposts fast enough to complete a wet dress rehearsal without bricking some critical piece of hardware.
The difference between SpaceX’s plan to commercialize lunar activity and the legacy systems we’ve been saddled with could not be more clear.