Rocket launch marks big step in building China’s lunar infrastructure

Queqiao-2 will relay data between Earth and Chinese spacecraft on the far side of the Moon.

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[Wickwick]

But who knows, maybe SpaceX's Starship program will be so successful that the US can land lunar Starships on the Moon by 2026, leap-frogging China and India, and obliterating Artemis in the process.

You do know that a Starship landing on the moon in 2026 is the Artemis III plan?

 

[Wickwick]

Yes, but with the whole SLS Lunar Gateway Orion package in there too. I meant without all that, just like how the Dear Moon mission would also be without all that.

Dear Moon will not include a surface visit. I'm pretty sure it's not even going into orbit that it's just a flyby on a free-return trajectory. I don't think SpaceX has plans to put people on the lunar surface if it's not for NASA - at least I don't recall Musk or Shotwell ever talking of aspirations in that direction. Their attention has always been Mars.

 

[Wickwick]

If you want a realistic chance of supporting a lunar base, it seems to me that a launch per week might well be needed, at least early on. Bootstrapping a working economy from scratch will take an enormous amount of stuff. And people.

On Earth, the environment is so friendly that you can build an economy from literally nothing, you can just hang out in the trees and survive, but one on Luna will need so much equipment to be even minimally viable, and will teeter on the brink of extinction for years and years, if it survives at all. Survival requirements will need ridiculous amounts of redundancy to be safe, and all that redundant gear will take a ton of maintenance, which means even more stuff launched from Earth.

I think it's likely to take at least a decade of weekly launches, and very possibly a lot more or a lot longer, before any lunar colony becomes self-sufficient. The investment required will seem like lunacy.

edit: and it's very possible our entire safety regime will have to change. If a Starship is lost, there's a good chance they won't be able to stand down for six months or a year to figure out what went wrong and fix it. They may have to keep launching to keep the people on the Moon alive while they figure it out.

If we're flying to the moon every week, it's not going to be a Starship doing it. You're looking 100+ tonnes of metal that are flying to (and presumably from) the moon for each trip. That's a ton of refill missions. One doesn't need 100 tonnes of structure to hold 100 tonnes of payload + the requisite propellant to land and lift off the moon. Something 1/5 that mass could suffice potentially.

 

[Wickwick]

If the tankers are routinely reused the dry mass shouldn't matter much. Propellants are cheap. But yes, an expendable Starship with a light third stage and some smallish engines instead of the payload section would be a rational way to deal with this. HLS being based straight on Starship is pretty much just a cost-cutting approach for SpaceX as far as development efforts are concerned with Artemis as planned by NASA. They bid with what they were meaning to build anyway.

Also to land and to lift off from the Moon isn't all, you also need to get there in the first place from LEO. A fully fueled Starship (without heat shield, flaps etc.) fits the bill nicely, even if it may have too much thrust and with this too many engines.

The mass of Ship is enough to withstand 6+ g's of acceleration. An ideal landing and launch on/from the moon is probably closer to 0.5 g. So it's not just that there's too much engine (there is). It's also that the wall thickness of Ship is perhaps 10 times higher than what is necessary for the loads that will be experienced from LEO to the lunar surface. Now instead of launching tankers every day+ you're launching perhaps twice per week. While propellant is relatively inexpensive, the launch costs and range availability are a concern.

 

[Wickwick]

Yes, but as it stands now HLS sorties will not be a regular thing in any way. HLS is quite braindead as just a dedicated Moon lander, but it's based on Starship, which WILL be a regular thing to fly.

Designing a dedicated (and substantial) craft to fly only a handful of missions and that is good for nothing else than that isn't the way SpaceX is doing things. They just bid on this because it halfway looked as if it could work, would earn them some money, allow them to gather experiences and nicely pad their launch cadence. I doubt that SpaceX cares very much about going to the Moon at all in itself.

I agree that a lightweight and possibly hydrolox stage could be much more efficient for this task. Just let BO do this if they can.

I started this line of thinking by saying weekly trips wouldn't be a Starship. Even as cheap as propellants are, that's too many tanker flights. So yeah, something else. If there's a market, SpaceX will address it. If there's not and NASA decides to do it anyways, maybe SpaceX bids, maybe they don't. But it won't be Starship.

 

[Wickwick]

OK, maybe I'm missing something here, but lift to and from the Moon strikes me as almost entirely irrelevant. About 99% of the mass lift for the first decades will be coming from Earth, because it has to. Luna's return shipments will be very sparse for a very long time.

AFAIK, you need 100 tons of mass to lift 100 tons of payload from Earth, which is going to be the only important criterion for a long, long time.

edit: maybe they'll get some kind of lighter space taxi to transit that 100 tons from LEO to Luna, but everything is still going to be going up to orbit from Earth on a Starship or equivalent, and probably everything's going to be coming down that way, too.

The trouble is, once you've made LEO you've only achieved less than half your delta-V assuming the HLS isn't being tossed and has to propulsively return to LEO. All that delta-V and mass is a lot of tanker flights.

A flight every 6 months? A Starship-derived HLS is probably fine. But the comment that kicked off this discussion was the need for weekly supply missions. Starship is too unoptimized for micro- and lunar-gravity operations.

 

[Wickwick]

You're looking at a colony as something that has to spring from an economic need, but you're forgetting there's a more primal reason that that will be people on the moon. Defense.

With the cost to access space dropping as much as it has the impetus and the ability to put people up there goes up. LEO is now filling up with Satellites after SpaceX proved their reduced costs can make Constellation sats viable. But LEO is close enough existing infrastructures will suffice.

Luna is the next ultimate high ground as I believe the article called it too. There will be as we understand it limited spots that will work for colonies, at least at first. Said spots are likely to be political pawns especially as China continues its rise to greater power. There is near certainly military interest in boots on the moon for the longer term. Both as a boast of military and technological prowess and in a claim staking sense.

Yes we have a treaty saying the moon and space aren't supposed to be militarized, but we all know that won't last when countries get belligerent. Look at the degradation of the nuclear treaties we have.

So once there's an established "fort" on the moon there will be possible incentives to send more people up there. Yes the soldiers up there aren't going to be buying over priced Camaros and eating at the local diner next year.

But long term habitable space will need support crews, support crews will mean there's likely space for other people as well, say scientists from NASA looking for cheaper lodgings than building their own.

So as DARPA's RFI that was talked about in a prior article suggests maybe communal resource hubs like electricity and heating and the like can be built in such a way that it spurs commercial providers. Who now have to send their own techs up. Those techs will want things to do, or will have free time to do things like live stream a buggy ride on the moon.

Which in our social media age will get millions of views. That will prove to someone there's a tourism or marketing market to pounce on and off we go.

It's almost certainly not next decade or even two, but that's IMO the likely natural course. Political pissing contest for prime lunar real estate into a workable small colony, then naturally into something much longer term as more economic benefits are created.

Relative to LEO, the lunar surface is low ground, not high. Lunar orbit is high "ground". But in space, high- or low doesn't really matter anymore. You're not just rolling down a hill. You have to use the same amount of propulsion to up or down. So it makes sense to have assets at whatever orbital shell you need or you just send everything from LEO or even earth's surface.

 

[Wickwick]

@Wickwick I respect you, but you're being incredibly pedantic over a statement about a political "high ground." Yes space literally above our heads is "higher ground" than being on the ground on the Moon. But my whole post was about the military and political impacts not just the technical aspects. Having a satellite in orbit around the Moon would not be the same has having boots claiming ownership of say Shackleton Crater. I think you know that there is a significant difference between the two which was my point.

I even end the whole post specifically talking about political pissing contests and you focus on a narrow definition of high ground. I get that putting some sats in orbit around Earth or the Moon probably has more generalized utility from a technical standpoint. But none of this is purely about what it technically the best it's roughly coequally about what is politically useful. When one nation wants to claim superiority and one wants to not lose it that's not strictly about who's got some satellites in a good spot.

My assumption about you "high ground" statement is that it is a tactical situation as was presented in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Tactically, having assets on the moon is no more helpful than having them on the surface of the earth. Perhaps one needs to find a different descriptive phrase than that one as the advantage of high ground for terrestrial combat has millennia of baggage. Even its usage with morality ("moral high ground") assumes one is higher than another.

As to your premise that the military will be defending positions on the moon for ... reasons, I find very not compelling. Should an adversary threaten our assets on the lunar surface, we will simply destroy their supply lines from LEO to Luna and they'll starve to death. Or we'll bombard their base with a million steel BBs. Or any number of other military responses that don't require troops on the ground. Nobody's space economy is so robust that they can withstand a blockade or intentional remote bombardment. And by the time economies are built up enough to have reinforced (underground) bunkers that can withstand penetrators at 10+ km/s, then there will be enough people and material on the moon that it could rightly be called a colony and not a research station.