Going back to the Moon.

With the normal stupid stuff going on, it’s easy to lose track of the impressive work being done.  SpaceX  routinely launches satellites into orbit and occasionally demonstrates an impressive new capability, but the big picture isn’t addressed very often.

The Artemis III project is planning to get people back to the moon in two years.  NASA is leading the project along with the space agencies of Europe, Italy, Germany, Japan, Canada, Israel and Dubai.

Humans haven’t walked on the Moon in over fifty years, and this time, we won’t be landing in an expedient contraption.  SpaceX is building the lunar lander.  The photo above shows the SpaceX HLS with other objects to show the scale.  Notice the tiny Apollo Lunar Module on the right.

Musk’s ultimate goal is to build a colony on Mars.  To do that, a Moon base is needed.  The Artemis projects is testing strategies to do that.  The SpaceX HLS will launch, without people, into Earth orbit, and get it’s fuel tanks topped off before heading to the Moon.  In lunar orbit, it will pick up people from NASA’s Orion spacecraft, and land on the Moon.  The astronauts will stay for a week, and go home.

Traveling through space doesn’t take much fuel.  Planets, moons and asteroids do it all the time.  Atmosphere is a problem because it slows the spacecraft and heats it up.  Gravity is also a problem.  Leaving the Earth is the worst.

Elon Musk knows how to make spaceflight cheap and routine. 

Eventually, the plan is to have a fueling station orbiting the Earth and one orbiting the Moon.  A shuttle or drop ship would be used to travel between the Earth or Moon, and the fueling stations.  A transport spacecraft would be on a continuous orbit between the Earth and the Moon.   The shuttles would not need fuel or accommodations for long trips because they only travel back and forth from orbit.  The transport ship would never enter an atmosphere or land, so wouldn’t need extensive heat shields, aerodynamics or as much structural integrity.

The Moon base is necessary to mine the fuel for the fueling stations.  It would be prohibitively expensive to bring it up from the Earth.  Water, available on the Moon, could be broken down to provide hydrogen and oxygen for rocket fuel.  It wouldn’t even be necessary to transport the water from the lunar surface to the fueling stations.  Since the Moon has no atmosphere and low gravity, blocks of ice could be fired into orbit near the fueling station. 

The technology exists for all of this.  Musk will get it done.