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.

See full article...

 

[malor]

Amazing that we will see lunar bases in our lifetime, and if we are fortunate, entire cities.
Would love to watch zero-g football live via Starlink playing at Moon City of Hong Kong Luna (straight out of Heinlein).

Yet, somehow, I'm sure we will still have Flat Earthers. I bet some will even be fans of lunar football.

 

[malor]

One launch every month or two is what’s needed, not once a year or two.

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.

 

[malor]

Both of their Moon landing systems need to be fully operational. Then if one is offline due to safety issues, then the other can continue with earth to lunar traffic.

That makes excellent sense. Having more than one lunar transportation system will make things a lot safer.

 

[malor]

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.

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.

 

[malor]

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.

If we want a true lunar economy, that is probably what we will have to use.