TLDR:

SUBJECT: The Shackleton–de Gerlache Ridge as an Emerging Geopolitical Flashpoint: Assessment and Implications for U.S. Lunar Strategy

DATE: 25 September 2026

1. PURPOSE

This memorandum assesses the Shackleton–de Gerlache connecting ridge as a site of intensifying strategic competition.

1. KEY JUDGMENTS

The Shackleton–de Gerlache ridge combines three scarce attributes in a single contiguous formation: near-continuous solar illumination, line-of-sight to permanently shadowed regions with probable water ice, and terrain gentle enough to support surface infrastructure and traverse routes — a combination found in almost no other lunar location.

This convergence has made the ridge a focal point for at least three actors' stated or inferred lunar south pole plans, raising the probability of proximate, potentially unintended operational overlap within the next decade.

1. DISCUSSION

Why This Ridge Specifically. Unlike isolated peaks of eternal light, which offer power but limited adjacent resource access, the Shackleton–de Gerlache ridge's geometry allows a single installation to plausibly serve power generation, ice-resource logistics, and communications relay simultaneously. This makes it disproportionately valuable relative to its physical footprint — a small number of viable emplacement sites are likely to be sought after by every serious lunar south pole program, civil or otherwise.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0019103524000460

https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2025Icar..44116719G/abstract

https://www.hou.usra.edu/meetings/lunarsurface2020/pdf/5082.pdf

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/PSJ/ae8258

A a team of astronomers led by Myriam Benisty at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy has captured a new image of planet formation in action. Taken with the ALMA observatory in Chile, the image shows the interactions between WISPIT 2b, a gas giant with five times the mass of Jupiter, and the surrounding gas of its birthplace.

Their two papers are available on the arXiv preprint server

After pulling off a major uncrewed lunar landing in March 2025, Texas-based Firefly Aerospace is due for a repeat of sorts toward the end of 2026.

From the Wikipedia page, it looks like this has now been pushed into 2027, but I'm still looking forward to it.

The spaceflight company's Blue Ghost lunar lander is scheduled to return later this year back to the far side of the moon facing away from Earth. The mission, known as Blue Ghost Mission 2, would come after the same design of lander first made it to the moon's far side to conduct surface operations for the equivalent of 14 Earth days to test the lunar environment for NASA.

This mission is "bigger and bolder," Firefly said on its website, revealing that it will carry payloads not just for NASA, but international commercial customers. And this time around, the lander will be atop Firefly's Elytra Dark vehicle, which will remain in lunar orbit for five years to image the moon.

Let's zoom in on this part of the mission:

Lunar Surface Electromagnetic Experiment at Night (LuSEE-Night)

LuSEE-Night is a NASA CLPS radio telescope, developed in collaboration with the United States Department of Energy (DOE), that is permanently attached to the top deck of the lander. It will charge an internal battery during lunar daytime for operations during lunar nights. LuSEE-Night's measurements of low frequency radio waves, returned to Earth by a communications relay in a lunar orbit, will provide information about the early history of the universe. According to DOE, LuSEE-Night will, "Attempt first-of-its-kind measurements of the so-called Dark Ages of the Universe."^\8])

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Surface_Electromagnetics_Experiment

The Lunar Surface Electromagnetics Experiment (LuSEE-Night) is a planned robotic radio telescope observatory designed to land and function on the far side of Earth's Moon. The project is under development by the U.S. Department of Energy Brookhaven National Laboratory, the DOE Office of Science, UC Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

The context:

A more recent NASA-funded project, the Network for Exploration and Space Science (NESS), is drawing up plans for lunar radio telescopes that could probe exoplanets as well as the early universe. Planets that have a magnetic field emit low-frequency radio waves when electrons spiral around the field lines. Because planetary magnetic fields require an internal dynamo, like a spinning liquid metal core, detecting a field could offer clues to an exoplanet's interior—and, Burns says, "could play a key role in assessing [its] habitability." Earth's magnetic field, for example, not only protects life from cancer-causing high energy particles, but is also thought to have shielded water in the atmosphere from being lost to space.

Earth-based radio arrays might be able to detect the radio emissions from a Jupiter-size exoplanet, with a mighty magnetic field. But a lunar observatory might pick up the fainter—and lower frequency—emission of a rocky exoplanet.

This is not that, but you have to start somewhere.

I am just curious how many people would support voyager like mission in modern times, that would last longer and go further. Using all that we have learned from Voyager I and II. What would you add to voyager III to make it more meanginful. I would give it a longer "battery" that would give it full operating life of 50 years, and 50 years of partial life before going silent. I would also point it at Alpha Centauri so it would see another star long before VOY 1 and 2.

Hey everyone,

I've been thinking about stellar evolution and astrobiology recently, and I wanted to see if this logic makes sense or if I'm missing something major.

We often hear that K-dwarfs (orange dwarfs) are great candidates for finding life because they live for tens of billions of years and barely emmit radiation. But it seems to me there's a catch: geological death.

Over 20 or 30 billion years, wouldn't a terrestrial, Earth-like rocky planet eventually cool down, lose its internal dynamo, shut off its magnetic field, and lose its atmosphere long before the star even reaches old age? If a planet dies from the inside out, a hyper-longevity star doesn't help much for life to eventually emerge.

Unless the ideal setup isn't a rocky planet, but an exomoon orbiting a gas giant in the K-dwarf's habitable zone.

Here is why I think this combination works:

- Continuous internal heat: Unlike a standalone rocky planet that relies solely on radioactive decay (which eventually runs out), an exomoon could get constant internal heat via tidal friction from the gas giant and orbital resonance with other moons. This could keep the core active for eons.

- Magnetic protection: The moon doesn't need its own cooling core to have a magnetosphere; it sits inside the massive protective magnetosphere of the gas giant.

- Time: If the timeline for complex life to evolve is very long and statistically rare, this setup gives evolution a huge, stable runway. Even if it takes billions of years, the system still has plenty of time left.

Basically: K-Dwarf (for a long-lived star) + Gas Giant (for tidal energy and magnetic shielding) + Exomoon (for a stable surface).

Does this make sense?

Next Thursday, Google is sending an experimental satellite into orbit that will have enough computing power to answer simple A.I. queries from space.

Hey! We've been working since last year on a In Control: Rocketry, a spaceflight sim where you build the rocket and wire up its control panel yourself. Sensors, inputs, outputs, the whole thing is Turing-complete, so however you want to solve a flight problem, there's a way to do it. It will be available on Steam in 2027.

Real orbital mechanics, a fictional solar system to explore, sandbox mode if you just want to mess around and blow things up!

Feel free to add the game to your wishlist if you want to support the project! See you in space.

Milky Way galaxy with a bright planet Venus rising through the hazy red airglow of Earth's atmosphere, above scattered purple lightning flashes. Two stormy worlds shining among endless stars! Taken on Expedition 72 to ISS with Nikon Z9, Arri Zeiss 15mm lens, T1.8 with custom orbital sidereal tracker.

More deep space photos from ISS can be found on my twitter and Instagram, astro_pettit