How SpaceX and NASA Will Build The First Moon Base!
SpaceX is going to land people on the Moon in this decade. And even though it wouldn’t be the first time we’ve accomplished this feat, it will be the first time in a long time and that’s still something genuinely awesome. The other day I noticed Elon Musk replied to a Tweet that said, “I get sad once a week that I wasn’t alive during the Moon landing.” Which is probably a sentiment shared by most millennials. And Elon wrote back, “You will be in the future.” Which I think is exactly the kind of optimism we need right now.
We do have a plan for going back to the Moon. It might not be the greatest plan, and it might be in a constant state of revision and it might even be more than a little bit behind schedule. But little by little and slowly but surely, the plan for the Moon is coming together. This is a massive collaboration between NASA and SpaceX and just like the very first time that people set foot on the Moon, this is going to change the world. So let’s talk about it.
Artemis Program
OK, let’s start with the NASA side of things because their vision of a 21st century Moon rocket is finally - finally - starting to come true. This is the Space Launch System, also known as SLS. It’s a big ass rocket, the most powerful that NASA have ever constructed. And the job of SLS is to launch the Orion spacecraft, which is the first crew transport vehicle NASA have built since the Space Shuttle. The crew section at least is American while the service module of Orion is a European design. These two machines will be the backbone of the Artemis Program and will transport people to the Moon. Or pretty close to the Moon, not quite all the way, but more on that in a bit.
The SLS has been in development since 2011 and it is just now being rolled out to the launch pad for the very first time. NASA is planning on March 17th as the day that they begin transporting SLS from its construction bay, over to launch Complex 39B at Kennedy Space Center. This will be the rocket’s first wet dress rehearsal and system check. This will take about a month to complete, but it will test every system on the rocket leading up to just seconds before engine ignition. After that the SLS goes back into the assembly building for another month of fine tuning. And then after that, it can be returned to the launch pad and we are ready to Launch Artemis One. This should happen sometime between May and July.
This will be a very extensive first test for SLS and Orion because they’re going to be headed for the Moon on their very first flight, which will be known as Artemis One. The uncrewed flight will go all the way out to orbit around the Moon. That’s not usual, but with the time crunch, NASA doesn’t have much choice. SLS should have begun launch testing back in 2016. And it definitely should have flown at least one dummy payload into orbit before strapping Orion on the top and firing it towards the Moon. But I guess after 11 years of building the thing, NASA has total faith in SLS. We’ll see. Plenty of rockets fail on their first launch. I think we could probably say that most rockets fail on their first launch. So, we’re in for a show this summer either way.
If Artemis One is successful, then Artemis Two should come either next year or the year after. Safe bet is to put this one in 2024 because this will be a crewed flight and that will probably slow the pace of the action to even more of a crawl than it it’s at right now. But this is going to be the exact same flight as the first mission, just with people inside the Orion this time around. SLS launches them out to orbit around the Moon and then they come back and splash down in the ocean.
Then we get to Artemis Three, this is the big show - landing people on the Moon. This was supposed to happen in 2024, we now know that is totally out of the question. NASA is still holding on to the idea that it can happen as early as 2025, but realistic forecasts seem to put this happening closer to 2028. This is a really tricky one because a lot of moving parts from different places need to all come together perfectly. So the third Artemis flight is much the same deal as the second one - SLS launches Orion which takes people to orbit around the Moon. But this time they’re going down to the surface. The only problem being that Orion can’t land, that’s just not something that it was ever designed to do. Which seems like an oversight, but no worries because NASA just brought yet another space ship into the mix - and that’s where we enter SpaceX.
The Lunar Starship
So NASA is in need of a lander. The plan is to transfer 2 out of 4 members of the Artemis Three crew from Orion to a Human Landing System or HLS that will be waiting for them in Lunar orbit and then have that lander descend to the surface of the Moon where those people will hang out for around 5 days and then fly the HLS back to orbit where they swap back to Orion and triumphantly return to the Earth. Originally there was supposed to be a fancy space station waiting for them in Lunar orbit called the Gateway, that would have made for a transfer point between the two vehicles and given a place to chill for the other two Artemis crew members who don’t get to walk on the Moon. But NASA have conceded that Gateway won’t be ready for Artemis Three, they’ll probably end up building it some time in the 2030s.
Anyway, NASA chose to do something smart and hand off the responsibility for building that HLS vehicle to a private company. They held a design contest, many entered, and SpaceX won. Jeff Bezos threw a fit, sued everyone involved and eventually lost but still managed to cause even more delays in the process. So by the fall of 2021 we had our confirmed Moon landing vehicle, the HLS Starship by SpaceX.
The Starship is a vehicle that SpaceX have been actively developing and testing since 2019. The idea is a fully reusable, super heavy lift rocket with an upper stage that can not only land back on Earth, but can also land on the Moon and even on Mars with people on board. It is an unprecedented vehicle for many reasons. In combination with its Super Heavy Booster, Starship is the biggest, most powerful flying machine ever assembled. And SpaceX have already gone as far into the development phase as fully assembling this beast - they haven’t launched it yet. But they will soon.
After about a year of building and testing and exploding prototypes of the Starship in suborbital launches, SpaceX are ready to put Starship into orbit for the first time. However, they can’t do that until the FAA grants them approval to conduct an orbital launch from their Starbase testing facility in Boca Chica Texas. Elon had previously said that Starship and Super Heavy would be ready to launch in summer of 2021 - that didn’t happen. But they are looking pretty damn close to being ready right now, we’re just waiting on the FAA approval. It was originally supposed to come by the end of 2021, then it was pushed to February, now we’re being told the announcement will come by March 28th. The reason that the FAA is giving for the delay is that they have to read through 19,000 comments left by the public on the subject of SpaceX launching a big ass rocket. Many people are opposed because they feel it is going to disturb the local animals and they don’t like that they can’t go to the beach while SpaceX are launching rockets. And on the other side is everybody who thinks that launching a giant rocket is worth the environmental impact for the good that it provides to humanity as a collective. It probably didn’t help that Elon invited his tens of millions of Twitter followers to submit their comments to the FAA, that’s undoubtedly how we ended up with so many comments that it’s taken literally months to read through them all. Elon kind of punked himself with that one.
But, we know that we are getting an orbital launch of the Starship this year. Elon has said that he’ll pack the whole thing up and move it to their pre-approved launch complex in Florida if he has to. So it’s inevitable. Honestly, it will probably happen around the same time as Artemis One, so this should be a pretty awesome summer for rocket launches and space missions.
The plan from SpaceX for this year with Starship is to conduct one or two orbital tests where the ship and booster will probably be destroyed in the process. But once they iron out the kinks, Starship will begin delivering Starlink satellites into orbit on a regular basis and attempting to land and reuse both the ship and booster stages. By the end of next year, SpaceX expects to be testing their orbital refilling technique that would use a tanker ship to top up Starship’s liquid oxygen and methane tanks for an extended flight to the Moon.
Assuming that all goes well, then we are set for a Lunar optimized version of the Starship. This is going to be a very different beast from the design that we are seeing at Starbase right now. The current orbital Starship is being built to deliver large quantities of satellites into Earth orbit and then return to the surface for a ground landing, either on a pad or being caught by a giant robot, we’ll have to see how that works out. So the top half of the current ship is just a big, empty cargo bay - that’s going to have to change for HLS.
The HLS Starship will need to have a pressurized crew compartment with a life support system - people are going to live in there for several days and they need to be comfortable. Elon said recently that SpaceX can scale up the same life support system from the Crew Dragon to support astronauts in the Starship for up to a few weeks. So that’s going to be the top most section of the ship with a hatch probably on the nose of the rocket. Then below the crew section will be a cargo bay that houses their research equipment and probably a rover of some kind for astronauts to drive around on the Moon - possibly made by Tesla? Lunar Cybertruck? Probably not, but could happen.
And then that cargo section is going to also have to include an elevator lift to actually get down to the surface of the Moon. Starship is super tall, 50m in height, and the access door for the cargo section is going to be about half way up the vehicle - the bottom half is going to be oxygen and methane tanks to power the ship’s flight from low Earth orbit to the Moon. And unlike the existing Starship, which uses those main Raptor engines for a controlled landing on Earth, the Lunar ship is going to have an extra set of thrusters built into the side that will control the slow descent to the surface of the Moon. Landing on the Moon is going to be much easier and less dramatic than the kamikaze skydive and last second engine burn that Starship has to make on it’s return to Earth. And that’s the other major difference for a Lunar Starship, it does not need a heat shield because the HLS will never return to Earth.
More than likely, after the HLS plays its part in the Artemis Three mission, it will just return to the surface of the Moon one last time and then stay there - it’s a gigantic steel structure on the Moon, we can use it for something purposeful in the future, probably tip it over, cover it with dust and rocks and make it a rough base of operations for future missions.
As for what those future missions might be? NASA has rough plans up to Artemis 5 right now - which should also be a human landing mission. Artemis 4 will not land on the Moon, but will be devoted to assembly of the lunar Gateway station in orbit around the Moon. The mission will deliver the I-Hab habitat module, developed by the European Space Agency and the Japanese space agency JAXA, to the Gateway. If we were thinking 2028 for Artemis 3, then probably 2030 for Artemis 4.
That means Artemis 5 at some point in the mid 2030’s is when things really pick up for human activity on and around the Moon because at this point they will have both the Gateway station and the Human Landing System at their disposal. That’s where we start to establish a permanent human presence on the Moon.
So, there it is, that’s the plan as it stands right now for getting people back to the Moon. It’s not necessarily a great plan, we could easily spend another 10 minutes or even an hour poking holes in it. But this is the way that NASA has decided it’s going to go down.
The most important takeaway is that things are in motion right now. SLS and Orion are very close to their first mission to Lunar orbit. Starship is equally close to its first mission to Earth orbit. And the two systems will spend a few years being perfected before they both come together to do something pretty spectacular and put people on the Moon. That’s something to –look forward to, something to be optimistic about and I’m sure we could all use a little more optimism in our lives right now.
