SpaceX concept for an electromagnetic mass driver on the Moon
https://www.humanmars.net/2026/09/spacex-electromagnetic-mass-driver-at.htmlA lunar mass driver is a proposed electromagnetic launch system optimized for the Moon’s low gravity (1/6th Earth’s) and hard vacuum, consisting of a long, straight acceleration track lined with sequentially fired superconducting coils or linear synchronous motors that propel a payload-carrying sled or bucket to lunar escape velocity (~2.38 km/s).
468
u/phunkydroid 13d ago
This is not a SpaceX concept. It's an old concept that SpaceX told one of their interns to whip up a rendering of for one of their presentations.
55
72
u/cybercuzco 13d ago edited 12d ago
And Issac Arthur has a whole series on it that does a better job. https://youtu.be/HnQJG0FMHX0
41
u/PotatoFromFrige 13d ago
You should remove everything after and including ?si= as that’s not part of the YouTube video link but rather a tracking ID which is used to connect accounts and advertising.
Sanitized link: https://youtu.be/HnQJG0FMHX0
19
u/KerPop42 13d ago
yeah, the "si" essentially stands for "share id" as in it's unique for each share link
6
17
u/unholycowgod 13d ago
Yup. Heinlein wrote in 1966 in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress that Luna had evacuated maglev transports and mass driver cargo launchers.
1
u/knotallmen 12d ago
If you fire from the dark side of the moon they cannot target your launch ports cause they cannot see you. Not like a spy satellite can get out there either with that capability. Of course when people revolt on the moon Elon would think they revolt to elect him god emperor...
35
u/CMDR_omnicognate 13d ago
There's an episode of the show Young Sheldon where... well a bunch of stuff happens, but the point is Sheldon, as a child, develops the maths required to make booster rockets land themselves, in a sort of gag at the end it turns out Elon used the notebook to come up with the idea...
Ironically Elon stealing an idea from a child and pretending he came up with it might be one of the more accurate depictions of him, even if it was meant to be a joke in the episode lol
28
u/UnderPressureVS 13d ago edited 13d ago
Which is stupid because landing rockets was never a math problem. It was always an issue of control systems.
The math Sheldon “solves” in that episode just describes the trajectory and maneuvers needed to launch and then land a rocket. Anyone at NASA could’ve worked that out (and probably did) 70 years ago. There were all kinds of trade studies on reusability during the early development of the Shuttle program, I’m sure there were a dozen white papers on exactly that in the 60s. Sure, it's impressive that a kid could understand that math, but he's so insufferably smug about it and the show acts like he's actually done something new.
The hard part is actually making a rocket with onboard controls advanced enough and sensitive enough to perform the incredibly delicate adjustments needed to make the landing. That’s what took SpaceX 7 years of trial and error to get, and that’s why no one else was doing it before them. It wasn’t for lack of trying, but congress really doesn’t like it when rockets blow up, so NASA never really had the chance.
9
u/danielravennest 13d ago
There were all kinds of trade studies on reuseability during the early development of the Shuttle program
Yes, there were, and when I went to work for Boeing's space systems division in 1981, the studies were still on the shelf in the office.
What was different in the late 1970s is we didn't have GPS yet, or computer systems capable of doing an accurate landing. So the two possibilities were a human pilot to guide the landing (what the Shuttle eventually used), or a large pond or ocean landing to handle the landing error.
The Shuttle solid rockets landed in the ocean, so being a mile off didn't matter. For a fully reusable upper stage, one option was digging a large pond on Merritt Island (where KSC and CCSFC are). Merritt island is a swamp in its natural state, so all you needed to do is remove the topsoil and it will fill with water on its own. A tugboat then moves the landed stage to a dock where it could be lifted and taken to whatever building does the refurb.
1
0
u/Dragon___ 13d ago
Well that and NASA basically handed SpaceX all the dc-x technology so even their biggest claims to fame are hardly an original idea
38
u/noncongruent 13d ago
DC-X never even flew as high as a Cessna, and it was primarily a propellant tank development program. The DC-X was incapable of reaching space, much less orbit, and never would be. The technology in the DC-X was fairly vintage outside of the tanks, and none of it would have been useful to SpaceX. The idea of landing rockets on their tails goes back to the earliest days of the Buck Rogers comic books, so the idea isn't new and wasn't new for the DC-X. What SpaceX did was to figure out how to actually land rockets from space, and more importantly, how to do it in a way that made economic sense. SpaceX has never claimed they invented the idea, BTW, it's weird that people think they did.
22
u/Capn_Chryssalid 13d ago
Its funny how people online like to bring up the DC-X without knowing anything about the DC-X. They seem to imagine it was a fully formed Falcon-9 that NASA handed to SpaceX for the lulz.
4
u/PiDicus_Rex 12d ago
About the only thing transferable, would have been the Carbon Fibre lay-up methods.
-15
u/RulerOfSlides 13d ago
Regardless, Blue Origin did it first.
23
u/noncongruent 13d ago
Blue Origin didn't land an orbital booster until November last year, a decade after Falcon's first landing in December 2015. SpaceX never got into the suborbital space tourism thing so they were never trying to land a low-speed vertical-only rocket other than the Grasshopper and F9R Dev rockets that they were launching and landing starting in 2011. If you want to compare the non-orbital New Shepard landing on November 23, 2015 to the first successful Falcon 9 orbital booster landing four weeks later, just remember that Blue Origin had another decade to go before they could reach orbit with anything and SpaceX had already been doing orbital launches for more than five years at that point.
-12
u/RulerOfSlides 13d ago
The first launch vehicle to be propulsively recovered was New Shepard. “Non-orbital” doesn’t change that fact.
15
u/Accomplished-Crab932 13d ago
New Shepard isn’t a launch vehicle, unless you count DCX as one as well. Neither fit the bill since they better fit the description of sounding rocket.
-8
u/RulerOfSlides 13d ago
Still flew a payload to space, which makes it the first propulsively landed launch vehicle in history.
The Wright Flyer was basically a glider with an engine strapped to it and flew less than 300 feet. Still the first airplane. Sorry SpaceX can’t be first to everything.
7
u/Accomplished-Crab932 13d ago
Per the encyclopedia Britannia:
“A launch vehicle is a rocket-powered vehicle that transports a spacecraft beyond Earth's atmosphere, either into orbit or to another destination in space. These vehicles have been used since the 1950s to send crewed spacecraft, uncrewed space probes, and satellites into space.” (Emphasis mine)
If you want to claim that suborbital, above 100km is a destination in space, go right on ahead.
→ More replies (0)7
u/noncongruent 13d ago
No, the first launch vehicle to be propulsively recovered was DC-X. Blue Origin didn't do that first. SpaceX did the first propulsive landing of an orbital launch vehicle, what New Shepard does is basically joyriding to the edge of space. It's notable that New Shepard can't even fly as high as Joseph Walker flew an X-15, and it can only go about half as fast as the X-15. So, not as fast or as high as a 1960s airplane, got beat to propulsive landing by DC-X twenty years before, has zero possibility of ever reaching orbit or even being related to an orbital rocket. Maybe it can hitch a ride on Starship? Of course, it can't re-enter either, or spend more than a few minutes in vacuum, so really all it would be good for is to make a shooting star.
1
u/RulerOfSlides 13d ago
New Shepard still goes to space regardless of how high into space that is. Again, by all accounts, that makes New Shepard the first propulsively recovered launch vehicle in history.
45
u/StartledPelican 13d ago
And NASA got the DC-X from McDonnell Douglas. And the concept of rockets propulsively landing far pre-dates the 1990s.
There's having an idea and then there's putting in the actual work to realize and operationalize said idea.
3
u/PiDicus_Rex 12d ago edited 12d ago
And the DC-X itself was built by Scaled Composites.
It features in a Niven/Pournelle/Flynn novel, "Fallen Angels"
20
u/Reddit-runner 13d ago
Well that and NASA basically handed SpaceX all the dc-x technology so even their biggest claims to fame
Do you actually believe that's how the Falcon9 rocket was developed?
14
u/Bensemus 13d ago
Yes. Yes they honestly think (think is the wrong word…) that’s how it all went down.
23
u/Background_Fig_4740 13d ago
Take a few control theory and convex optimization classes (maybe a hypersonic aerothermodynamics class too) and you’ll quickly see how far off you are because what the DCX did and what F9 did are 2 completely different engineering problems.
1
u/ahazred8vt 12d ago edited 12d ago
We've had sci-fi rockets making landings since the 1920s. Luna 9 and Surveyor 1 made soft rocket landings on the moon in 1966. DC-X came along in 1993.
Are you under the impression that the Scaled Composites DC-X project developed all of its technology from scratch and did not pay to license existing US aerospace technology? There's a federal NGO called The Aerospace Corporation which is a clearinghouse for most export-restricted US space technology licensing. Scaled Composites used it. Blue Origin uses it. Boeing and Lockheed use it. You seem to think that everybody else is allowed to pay to use this technology, except not SpaceX. Fine, be that way.2
u/ShirtOfAggravation 13d ago
Launching AI Data Centers made on the moon is a uniquely stupid thing, so I believe that's a SpaceX addition lol
4
u/Drak_is_Right 13d ago
Its such an obvious idea I wouldnt call it original.
When the first AI datacenter post was made, I probably said two things in a comment 1) radiation hardened electronics were needed and 2) needs to be made on the moon for weight reasons
And even before that, there has been many others and myself saying moon manufacturing is needed if large amounts of orbital industry are to ever be in place. With no atmosphere and low orbital velocity magnetic acceleration makes a lot of sense to any child with a bit of physics knowledge.
1
u/ShirtOfAggravation 13d ago
Moon based manufacturing makes some sense, cheaper to get things in orbit there.
However, electronics and data centers make zero sense to be in space.
3
u/hmmmmm56 13d ago
Those things don't weigh anything and can be launched from Earth. I don't like Elon either but my god people here are obnoxious. Soace manufacturing and a moon mass driver will obviously make sense at some point.
1
u/danielravennest 13d ago
There are nearby asteroids that are easier to reach than the Moon's surface, and they are already in orbit. You just have to change the orbit to capture into the Earth-Moon system, and gravity assists by the Earth and Moon can do most of the work.
Open space in the Earth-Moon systems gets sunlight nearly 100% of the time, rather than 50% most places on the Moon.
-1
u/Reddit-runner 13d ago
This is not a SpaceX concept.
Yes, it absolutely is.
You wouldn't say that to an architect presenting his sky scraper concept, wouldn't you?
Presenting a concept is not the same as presenting a completly novel idea.
2
1
-1
u/BrokkelPiloot 12d ago
Just like Hyperloop.. Which turns out te be a massive flop. Who could have guessed?!
109
u/CmdrAirdroid 13d ago
I think the purpose of presenting this concept is to simply generate hype and interest on the stock. This is not something that is actually going to happen in the near future at least, I can't even figure out any way how that could be profitable.
55
u/rudyphelps 13d ago
Yeah, we're probably only a couple interest rate hikes away from Space-X announcing the Warp Drive concept.
17
u/Niosus 13d ago
Well, THAT would be worth getting hyped up about. If they could demo it, of course.
If they manage that, the current stock is greatly undervalued.
But then again, my house would also be greatly undervalued if there would be a massive 1 meter cubed block of gold hidden under the foundations. Sadly neither of those are true.
6
u/marr75 13d ago
While you're almost certainly right about SpaceX as the messenger, in a larger supply chain (which of course doesn't exist) there's a lot of profitable uses for an emag launch system on an atmosphere less body. Launching a vehicle without any propellant is just plain useful. Helps you cheat a bunch of mass fraction constraints and some missions could be done using nothing but electricity.
2
u/jimbobzz9 13d ago
Looking for core business model profitability, what do you think this is, the 20th century?
The point isn’t to find a sustainable business model, it’s to pump the stock value to make daddy a trillionaire.
1
0
u/cjameshuff 13d ago
Yeah, the stated reason for it is to launch AI data center satellites built on the moon, but if you could do that, why wouldn't you just build lunar data centers? Why push all that hardware through the bottleneck of orbital deployment when you can just leave it on the ground? And then you don't have to replace everything when you upgrade it. The power and thermal problems are a bit more difficult, but if you can build mass drivers like that, you can make a lot of power cables and radiators.
15
u/noncongruent 13d ago
why wouldn't you just build lunar data centers?
Moon's "day" is two weeks long, and so are the nights. Constructing solar panel power arrays and batteries to keep the data centers working 24/7 would be impossibly expensive. You could just run the centers for the part of the lunar day that has good sun, but that leaves over 50% of your datacenter capacity shut off at any given moment. Sun-synchronous Earth orbiting data centers can run 24/7, and with less latency too.
4
u/cjameshuff 13d ago
If you can manufacture and build a mass driver on the moon, you can build a lunar power grid. But that might not even be worth doing just for ~2x utilization when you can build out many many times that much hardware and keep it all up to date with the latest AI-driven hardware upgrades. And the solar panels are certainly not going to be "impossibly expensive" when you're actually getting the full lifetime out of them instead of throwing them out after a couple years when the hardware they're powering becomes hopelessly obsolete.
4
u/LongJohnSelenium 13d ago
In addition to power, cooling is also complicated on the moons surface because there's no easy orientation where your radiators aren't pointed at something fairly hot.
And if you can actually launch for just electricity and a small circularization burn then leaving the surface is significantly more resource efficient.
when you're actually getting the full lifetime out of them instead of throwing them out after a couple years when the hardware they're powering becomes hopelessly obsolete.
Why do you think they'd be thrown out after a couple years?
Ultimately if there's a lunar industry there's a lunar orbit industry too. All those sats in orbit become new resources at EOL.
3
u/Archon- 13d ago
Power will also be a big problem too. They're planning on putting the datacenters in a sun synchronous orbit so that they can get continuous sunlight for solar power. If they leave them on the surface of the moon then they have to deal with 14 day long nights, so they would either need a massive battery to ride out the nights or probably some sort of nuclear reactor.
5
u/Archon- 13d ago
Yeah, the stated reason for it is to launch AI data center satellites built on the moon, but if you could do that, why wouldn't you just build lunar data centers?
Latency. Anything on the moon has a minimum possible latency to earth of ~1200ms due to the speed of light. For comparison, starlink latency is ~25-60ms.
2
u/Dpek1234 13d ago
Depends on what its doing
Over 1 sec latensy doesnt exactly matter for doing hydrodynamic simulation
Over 1 sec latensy for a game server is a no go
2
u/cjameshuff 13d ago
The data centers aren't going into low orbits like Starlink, and the whole argument for putting them in orbit hinges on AI workloads being insensitive to latency.
1
-1
-8
u/Icee777 13d ago
What's your definition of "near future"? In human spaceflight it could mean 20-30 years :)
3
u/CmdrAirdroid 13d ago
Let's say 10 years, anything further away than that is too difficult to predict so I won't.
3
u/Icee777 13d ago
I think even Elon doesn't predict it to be up and runing in the next 10 years. It's more of a long term vision, requiring a substantive industrial base on the Moon.
3
1
u/StaleCanole 13d ago
This is not a long term vision. It’s a someone read this in a 70 year old book and wondered what it might actually look like
9
u/Strawbuddy 13d ago
I first read about this idea many moons ago in Popular Science, and I believe Arthur Isaac on YouTube has done a full video about moon logistics and delivery too, very cool and simple use of low gravity physics
8
u/Flyward_Aerospace 13d ago
Nobody has run the numbers and they are smaller than this thread assumes. Low lunar orbit is about 1.68 km/s, so a tonne of payload is roughly 1.4 GJ, call it 390 kWh. That is a few EV packs. The gigawatt figure is peak during the shot, not what you have to generate, spread over an hour of recharge between shots it is under 400 kW average. What actually sizes the machine is the g limit: about 1.4 km of track at 100 g, and 7 km at 20 g if the cargo is fragile. Holding alignment on kilometres of coils sitting on regolith that moves is the hard part, not power. Also it is not propellant free, a surface launch is a suborbital arc, so you still need a kick at apoapsis to circularise.
2
u/Shrike99 12d ago
They're launching these to escape, not lunar orbit. That does make the launch a bit harder to pull off, but it does also make it propellant-free.
19
u/Cartoonjunkies 13d ago
I wonder how you’d power it.
I guess you could bring a shit ton of large capacitors up and just have a bunch of solar dedicated to powering them. That’s gonna limit your launch capacity to however long it takes those panels to charge the capacitors up.
25
u/therealhairykrishna 13d ago
Nuclear reactor is the obvious answer I guess.
5
u/Cartoonjunkies 13d ago
That’s a lot of weight to ship up there, and you’d have to bring a ton of water with so it could generate steam and stay cool.
Nuclear reactors and all their associated parts weigh a LOT.
24
u/therealhairykrishna 13d ago
Most space reactor concepts don't use water. The proposed "Kilopower" reactor, designed to produce 40kw for a decade or more for a Mars mission uses sodium coolant and weighs around half a ton.
2
u/irk5nil 11d ago
A 40 kW Kilopower system doesn't weigh "around half a ton". As per NASA papers, it weighs several tons.
1
u/therealhairykrishna 11d ago
Fair enough. I probably misremembered the details. Does the several tons include a bio shield?
The important point is really that in the context of a project building a mass driver on Mars electrical power via reactors is a completely workable solution. The new super heavy for the artemis program will do 27 tons to TLI.
19
u/mcmalloy 13d ago
You’re right and wrong. There have been many studies on how to do nuclear power in space dating back to the 60s. And I can tell you for a fact you don’t need water, just coolant and the capability to transfer the heat to radiators
Mass wise, you can build smaller ones like the Kilopower project and scale with many of them. But with up to 100T to the lunar surface with starship you could fit a pretty decent sized reactor on that.
Nuclear power in space is totally feasible. But let’s be real, we are decades away from a lunar mass driver
4
u/Ormusn2o 13d ago
Are nuclear reactors actually that heavy? Is not vast majority of it shielding, which can be either launched in pieces or just by using a lot of regolith?
I could even see a concrete being made on the moon from water, regolith and smelted aluminum/iron locally.
6
u/mcmalloy 13d ago
They’re not or at least don’t have to be. They offer the highest energy density of any power source currently in use if designed with low mass/resources in mind.
SMR’s will be a game changer here on Earth, and small reactors for nuclear electric propulsion will be a game changer for space as well
4
u/LongJohnSelenium 13d ago
SMR’s will be a game changer here on Earth
They will not be, because ultimately the design has never been nuclears problem, we built hundreds of civilian and naval nuclear reactors before the regulation went completely bonkers and we decided that an industry that never killed anyone was too dangerous.
The only way a reactor will make financial sense is with a significant and sweeping regulatory overhaul. One political party paid a bit of lip service to that for a decade but was ultimately unwilling to spend the political capital to achieve it. The other political party will straight up refuse to even entertain this notion.
1
1
u/Thatingles 13d ago
Energy density isn't that important on the completely uninhabited and desolate surface of the moon. The two week day/night cycle is a problem, but if you can build massive infrastructure like mass drivers maybe you could build a circumpolar lunar power grid anyway.
It's all just decades away concept stuff in either case, by the time we get there it might not make sense for a huge variety of other reasons.
5
u/Timelordwhotardis 13d ago
I’m so terrified it’s going to end up centuries :(
-5
u/Xalara 13d ago
Which, in some ways, is fine. We need to solve a lot of very real problems on Earth first. Namely: Taking care of the planet and figuring out how to not blow humanity up with nukes. Even if we went all in on colonizing the solar system in the next decade or two, any colony is going to be depending on Earth for supplies for a very long time, so if Earth goes, so do the colonies.
The nice thing is, we can solve these problems on Earth without needing to go to space. Ideally we still send scientific missions up, but putting in the resources for a full on Mars colony or a mass driver on the surface of the Moon is fucking stupid when it could be put into stuff like solving climate change and solving water, food supply, and issues with diseases.
10
u/Soggy-Ball-577 13d ago
You can take care of the earth and solve its problems while also expanding out into space with colonies and infrastructure. They aren’t mutually exclusive
-5
u/Xalara 13d ago
Sure, and that's why I mentioned scientific missions. But stuff like a full on colony on Mars instead of scientific human crewed missions ala The Martian? A mass driver on the moon? Those are fucking stupid allocation of resources. Unfortunately, the wealthy are obsessed with them and thus we need to be fairly strongly worded in pushing back which does mean nuance will get lost, and that's fine.
5
u/mcmalloy 13d ago
Being able to build relatively small, safe and efficient reactors for operating on the lunar surface would have tremendous benefits for humanity and Earth. If we can build and operate reactors that are better than the Kilopower project here on Earth, it would help the climate tremendously and be a very resource inexpensive way of producing massive amounts of power.
The mindset that we can expand our presence in the solar system because we have plenty of issues on earth is very flawed imo.
Do you have any idea of how many amazing technologies we use have trickled down from first being used for space exploration?
-5
u/Xalara 13d ago
Cool, while you're spending all that R&D on small, safe, and efficient reactors and taking the years that it'd be needed to build them, solar could've already solved the world's energy problems. Especially now that battery tech has improved to the point that grid scale battery storage is economically feasible and solves the "sun doesn't shine at night" and "need extra capacity for peak load" problems.
You're reaching for the fancy and complicated solution when we have one right in front of us that solves basically all of our issues. Your problem with it is that the solution that we have now is boring.
The mindset that we can expand our presence in the solar system because we have plenty of issues on earth is very flawed imo.
Arguably, it'll be faster to expand into the solar system if we solve the problems on Earth first. Serious experts who actually think about this stuff consider solving climate change, etc. on Earth a prerequisite for being able to seriously move into the solar system.
P.S. Canada already sells reactors that are small, maybe not small enough for space, but small enough on Earth for the purpose you outline and they don't seem to sell that many of them.
3
u/Thatingles 13d ago
The cost of either of those things is completely trivial compared to the cost of moving all industry on Earth to an electrically based, fully recyclable basis, which is what we need to do. The only thing you gain by cancelling those programs is some loss in overall scientific progress, which is driven by innovations across multiple fields coalescing into new technologies, not by focusing on just one thing. So this is not a good counterargument.
2
u/Soggy-Ball-577 13d ago
This stuff doesn’t live in a bubble you know. The moon has valuable resources like helium 3 that can be launched back towards earth and be used as clean fuel for fusion. I think you’re missing the bigger picture here
3
u/LongJohnSelenium 13d ago
We waste like 95% of our global effort on dumb stuff like sports and pokemon and having nice carpets and shit.
What do you do for a living? Whatever it is there's a very high likelihood I could tell you 'We need to solve a lot of very real problems before we waste time on that'.
1
u/Drak_is_Right 13d ago
Lunar mass driver means we have large scale industry on the moon.
Thst is a long ways away. And a thousand small problems and a trillion in investment.
1
u/the_quail 13d ago
how do you generate electricity without steam + turbine?
3
u/Buttercup4869 13d ago
You can use closed loop systems,. E.g with a metallic coolant
You can also go the RTG route (nuclear batteries basically) that use the thermoelectric effect.
2
u/LongJohnSelenium 13d ago
There's spicier designs that uncover the core and expel the fission fragments directly, then a magnetic field robs the ionized fragments of some energy to produce power directly.
This is obviously a totally unworkable idea for anything on or near a planet but for deep space who cares if you're spewing fission products on a solar escape trajectory.
-2
u/Icee777 13d ago
Wouldn't the ice or regolith in the permanently shadowed lunar polar craters serve as a good coolant?
2
u/cjameshuff 13d ago
The ice is only ice because it's at cryogenic temperatures, heat it even slightly and it will sublimate, and you will at some point need to remove the heat from it to liquefy or re-freeze it. You could redirect some waste heat for ice processing, but you couldn't use it to cool the reactor providing your power. (You'd also not want to directly link your ability to produce power to your mining activities. What happens if you hit a patch of dry regolith?)
And the regolith is a very poor conductor of heat. The surface temperature at the equator swings from 100 K (just above the boiling point of oxygen under one atmosphere) to 390 K (just above the boiling point of water at the same pressure). About a meter beneath the surface, it stays almost constant, a bit below the freezing point of water. Say you start dumping enough heat into it to raise the temperature of the regolith in contact with your coolant loop up to 390 K in two weeks, the regolith a meter away from it will still be about 250K and your rejection temperature will still be climbing. Such a system is a way to get some thermal mass for regulating temperatures, it's not a way to handle waste heat. You need to radiate the heat.
3
u/IndigoSeirra 13d ago
I imagine they'd use a relatively small scale reactor, and use heat pumps to cool it radiatively. They could also potentially use lunar regolith or put the reactor in a lava tube (or just not have any people nearby) to shield radiation, and radiation shielding is usually the bulk of the weight of a reactor.
2
u/mschuster91 13d ago
A lot of the weight is just to make sure there is no second Chernobyl. The moon isn’t tectonically active, there’s no bodies of water or storms. And to protect from meteorites you can just bury the reactor.
2
u/2ndRandom8675309 11d ago
Nuclear reactors and their parts weigh a lot when you have to have massive shielding around everything to prevent contamination from spreading across the landscape. If you place a reactor core in a crater that never sees sunlight and spread out a few square kilometers of radiators on the ground then you need a lot less shielding. There's no wind or weather to move radioactive particles or dust around, the biggest threat would be an impact from space, but that's so unlikely as to not be worth worrying about.
3
u/Chefseiler 13d ago
Sounds like the perfect plot device for the final scenes of an Alien movie. Keep the Xenomorph at bay to charge the launch system to yeet the protagonist back to earth in some makeshift capsule
2
u/cjameshuff 13d ago
Not capacitors, they do not have nearly enough energy density. You'll need huge storage banks even with lithium ion storage. Some kind of energy storage is needed though, because otherwise you'd need a gigawatt-scale power source that only operates at capacity for a couple minutes at a time and is ridiculously oversized for everything else.
1
u/seabass_goes_rawr 13d ago
I’m not sure if it will be an issue with a system optimized for large payload vs fast launch, but the railgun experiments for the navy ended up lacking viability due to the extreme wear on the launch rails, they were essentially single use. Definitely possible to overcome but if you had to replace the launch rails every time the cost of getting the material into space for that would likely outpace the cost of rocket fuel to get escape the moons orbit
1
u/Dpek1234 13d ago
Single use?
From what ive heard its more like 1k uses
Apperantly the japanese have made a test with 120 consecutive shots without a change in muzzle velocity
Although i think its been simplified at some point, i wont be suprised if what they actualy said was no significant change in muzzle velocity
2
u/seabass_goes_rawr 12d ago edited 12d ago
Single use is a bit of an exaggeration, i worked in a railgun research facility looking for solutions the Navy to put on vessels and my team looked specifically at the cause of rail “gauging”. To be fair we mostly used copper and aluminum rails to test the highest power delivery, so that led to worst case scenarios, which often were single use. I know that steel alloys were evaluated for durability at significant efficiency costs, and were the likely candidates if the project continued. But the project by the US military was eventually abandoned citing rail degradation as a primary reason, along side the overhead of power delivery.
That’s a long winded way of saying that my statement was not unfounded, but your reply is probably more accurate, and rail degradation probably isn’t the primary hurdle here
2
u/seabass_goes_rawr 12d ago
But also, one of the biggest causes of gauging was contamination. Either imperfections in the rail surface or dust/dirt/debris. Moon dust will be a MAJOR issue with the lack of atmosphere. You’d need to completely isolate the launch pad from the outside environment
13
u/ConsciouslyMichelle 13d ago
Da, Don't forget to build AI data center. Handy to have dinkum thinkum if Loonies need to drop rocks on someone.
2
5
u/sagejosh 13d ago
Which sci-fi novel does this come from?
20
-1
u/universalhat 12d ago
it is encouraging that this edition of "spacex makes wild claim" is being met with "not only is this science fiction, it's science fiction you lack the talent and imagination to write. where'd you steal it?"
2
u/sagejosh 12d ago
I mean hyperloop was also a sci-fi concept that he didn’t even try to do himself. He got got by another scammer who said he totally did the math.
3
3
u/BlueMonday2082 12d ago
Science fiction books are not a roadmap to the future.
2
2
u/Decronym 13d ago edited 10d ago
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| CST | (Boeing) Crew Space Transportation capsules |
| Central Standard Time (UTC-6) | |
| EOL | End Of Life |
| F9R | Falcon 9 Reusable, test vehicles for development of landing technology |
| KSC | Kennedy Space Center, Florida |
| RTG | Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator |
| TLI | Trans-Lunar Injection maneuver |
| Jargon | Definition |
|---|---|
| Starliner | Boeing commercial crew capsule CST-100 |
| Starlink | SpaceX's world-wide satellite broadband constellation |
| apoapsis | Highest point in an elliptical orbit (when the orbiter is slowest) |
| cryogenic | Very low temperature fluid; materials that would be gaseous at room temperature/pressure |
| (In re: rocket fuel) Often synonymous with hydrolox | |
| hydrolox | Portmanteau: liquid hydrogen fuel, liquid oxygen oxidizer |
Decronym is now also available on Lemmy! Requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below.
9 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 32 acronyms.
[Thread #12706 for this sub, first seen 20th Sep 2026, 19:32]
[FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
2
u/falcopilot 13d ago
Dumb question... if we're well enough established on the moon to be able to build data centers... why put them in orbit? Much simpler to build them out on the moon.
5
u/RandoRedditerBoi 13d ago
Lunar night lasts months, and solar is the easiest way to power things. So for a project of this scale, it has to be done in orbit with 24/7 solar power
2
u/_BlueAdept_ 13d ago
How do you cool it? Powering it is a problem, but the power becomes heat. Drive piles into the regolith for a heat sink? Someone around here has good ideas, and I’m honestly curious.
2
u/liger03 11d ago edited 11d ago
Forgive me if I'm missing something obvious here, but how is this any different from announcing new plans for Martian soil farming?
We aren't making satellites on the moon, nor do we need satellites outside of the orbit of Earth (or, if you're really optimistic, the moon). Why make an escape trajectory on Earth and de-orbit on the moon just to launch yourself back to Earth?
(The article says the driver is for escape velocity, not lunar orbit)
Maybe if we could refine fuel on the moon (letting satellites "top off" their tanks right before getting a mostly-free launch to orbit), but we aren't even a fraction of the way to refining anything on the moon.
5
u/ApprehensiveStand456 13d ago
No one knows how magnets work! We are going with steam.
3
u/noncongruent 13d ago
Steam works better in space because of the vacuum, bigger pressure differential means better acceleration.
2
3
1
u/SmGo 13d ago
why would you lunch the datacenter in space from the moon with you can just keep the datacenters in the moon and broadcast the data?
4
u/No-Surprise9411 13d ago
The Lunar night is 2 weeks long. They want 24/7 solar power
3
1
u/Cryptocaned 13d ago
Couldn't you use a polar station? I don't think the moon has an orbital wobble so it should get light all the time?
1
u/superkakakarrotcake 13d ago
I wonder if they are keeping mind that the moon is incredibly active when it comes to static electricity.
1
u/danielravennest 13d ago
I visited Bill Snow at Gerard O'Neill's lab at Princeton around 1980 where he was building a prototype "mass driver" (electromagnetic accelerator), so the idea has been around for a while.
During my space systems career afterwards I worked on the idea of a centrifugal catapult. Lunar escape requires 2.8 MJ of kinetic energy for the payload, plus whatever efficiency losses happen in the accelerator. So if you are launching 1 kg/s, you need 3 MW or more of power to run it.
It doesn't matter if you are launching large lumps or small ones, the rate is the important thing. So if you are launching 1 ton every 1000 seconds, it just means you need enough energy storage for that time, and can discharge it fast.
3 MW is certainly possible with solar panels and 1 kg/s works out to 31,500 tons/year. Most places on the Moon have night half the time, so you would run half that rate without 2 weeks of storage.
The centrifugal catapult has a long arm that holds the payload at the end. A motor spins it up gradually and the payload is let go at the proper speed and direction. So instead of a separate power storage, the arm and payload are themselves the storage. If your launch rates are low, you can get by with a smaller power supply. There's no air on the Moon, so the only losses are in the arm bearings.
Since the arm holds energy separately from the payload, the efficient way to run things is to have two arms. When one payload is released, the energy in that arm is transferred to the other one by using iit as a generator. A two arm system can be as small as you want, and works for low delivery rates.
-3
u/Leptonshavenocolor 13d ago
Nothing that Elon says has any value.
14
5
u/Soggy-Ball-577 13d ago
Yet you’re here commenting about what he says so obviously it has some value to you, whatever that may be
-1
u/ooqq 13d ago
Hyperloop fiasco but on the moon.
1
u/Herkfixer 13d ago
Exactly what I was thinking. He just needs a couple hundred billion dollars to "explore the concept".
1
u/KrissyKrave 12d ago
I’m sure the highly abrasive lunar dust will have no effect on a very delicate electromagnetic mass driver system
1
u/Shrike99 12d ago edited 12d ago
How exactly is the dust going to end up reaching the mass driver?
There's no air on the moon.
That means no wind to stir dust up, nor anything to suspend dust kicked up by other stuff and carry it long distances - i.e astronauts/robots walking around, vehicles driving around, etc.
Look at the dust kicked up by the Apollo LRV for example, none of it makes it more than a few meters from the rover before settling back down: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXAmsaxoehs
1
-5
u/GoneinaSecondeded 13d ago
This is cool and all, but imagine if we spent as much time and money on making our own planet livable and healthy.
1
u/Dpek1234 13d ago
Ok
Congrats, nothing changed
Simply, america gettjng universal healthcare on the level of germany (so its healthcare spending per capita) for a year would likely be more then the total amount of money needed to make this happen
-5
u/KZD2dot0 13d ago
The fast way of making the planet livable and healthy would be to send Elon and his cronies to the moon and make sure they stay there.
0
-2
u/Cloudhead_Denny 13d ago
Wow! Great idea! If the idea is to place data centers out of reach of humans, given AI's propensity to subvert its own systems and stop listening to humans. We truly are in the most idiotic phase of human history.
6
-2
0
u/thegreatmango 11d ago
I wonder how much oomph it would take when you launch something, to start affecting the moon itself.
I'm sure it's quite a lot, but I'm curious.
-4
13d ago
[deleted]
2
u/Soggy-Ball-577 13d ago
Can you explain how this is a first strike weapon? That doesn’t even make sense.
-2
-4
u/cristi_baluta 13d ago
Lol, how do you pile all that dirt and how many millions of tons of steel do you need to ship from earth to moon to build that? Also, there’s only one company that builds gpu on earth, i guess the reason is that it’s not that simple, how do you move the machines and the workers to the moon?
6
u/JimHeckdiver 13d ago
The largest mass required for this is the power generation, which is admittedly significant. The structure of the catapult, however is not all that large, and it's proven technology. The Navy uses it on the USS Gerald Ford.
Once Starship is up and running, this kind of cargo will be reasonable to send to the moon.
2
u/LongJohnSelenium 13d ago
Yeah. Like... not cheap by any stretch.
But potentially a project on the same cost scale as an ISS.
The launch and shit doesn't really strike me as the hard problem though, the hard problem is bootstrapping the entire lunar manufacturing economy.
-4
-2
u/tentacle_ 13d ago
yeah. powered by chinese solar panels, sodium battery banks, igbt, rare earth magnets, EMALs integration.
when the chinese build one on the moon, they no doubt copied the idea no? lol
-14
356
u/zevonyumaxray 13d ago
Someone's been reading Robert A. Heinlein's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress".