The SpaceCom Column

“Amateurs talk about tactics, but professionals study logistics” – General Robert H. Barrow, Commandant of the Marine Corps, 1980.  

In the California Gold Rush of 1849, the people and companies who made the most money were not the miners, but those who sold mining tools. Prospectors would come and go, but there was always a demand for picks, shovels, and the other equipment miners needed to stake and work their claims.  

At Italian Tech Week, the topline excitement was Blue Origin Founder and CEO Jeff Bezos saying that gigawatt data centers would be built in space “in a decade or two” and how he expects millions of people to live in space over the same timeframe. His more insightful comments about Blue Origin’s technology stack didn’t get the coverage they deserved, including the technical achievements to build a solar-powered cryocooler for the Blue Moon lander to store liquid hydrogen on a long-term basis and research & development progress made for processing lunar regolith into oxygen for life support and fuel, plus the elements needed to build solar cells for power.  

Bezos is well familiar with the picks and shovels strategy, having moved Amazon from a simple seller of books to a full-service e-commerce shop and leveraging the tools he built for that into Amazon Web Services (AWS). Blue Origin may be the best positioned to profit from deep space exploration by building the infrastructure to leverage non-terrestrial resources on the Moon to ultimately pave the road to Mars. 

“The moon is a gift from the universe,” said Bezos. “It takes about 30 times less energy to lift a kilogram of mass off the moon than it does to lift it off the earth. So, we can use the moon as a rocket fuel depot to go to the rest of the solar system.” 

Leveraging the Moon as a supply depot to go other places in the solar system is something that Blue Origin isn’t trying to hide. “Each kilogram of oxygen we make on the lunar surface is one less that we have to launch from Earth, making a giant leap toward permanent settlements as well as critical resources for transportation to the Moon, Mars, and beyond,” said Pat Remias, Vice President, Advanced Concepts and Enterprise Engineering in a September press release touting Blue Alchemist milestones.  

The press release went on to say that Blue Origin is on track to organically scale its system to make lunar landings up to 60% cheaper and reduce fuel cell/battery masses by up to 70% by refueling those systems with regolith-derived oxygen on the Moon and this is independent of tapping into lunar ice for hydrogen and oxygen. 

If Blue Origin unlocks the lunar resources for lunar exploration, certainly there’s a role for it to be slotted into the current SpaceX Starship deep space architectures, which are very much dependent at this point upon a single Starship in LEO requiring multiple Starship tanker flights to fill up on fuel before being able to depart other points in the solar system, be it a short hop to the Moon or a longer journey to Mars.  

Exactly how many refueling flights are required is still an unknown variable, with Elon Musk estimating 8 to 16 for a lunar Starship trip with a lighter vehicle without heat shield tiles while a Mars Starship will be heavier since it needs atmospheric protection. Scale those refueling flights to a thousand Starships per two-year Mars launch window that Elon wants and suddenly lunar fuel looks a lot more attractive both for Starship and the dearth of heavy launch pads on planet Earth.  

Lunar resources become even more attractive to future Mars missions and colonization if SpaceX and other explorers move away from baseline chemical engines and the Starship form factor into electric propulsion, VASMIR, and other concepts that would use Moon-produced solar cells and propellants.  

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