Musk Has Totally Lost His Mind
He is a literal lunatic.
If you thought Musk’s decision to choose the Moon over Mars was a brain-dead cop-out, wait until you see what he has planned for this lunar city — that is, if it can even be built. The New York Times recently reported that SpaceX informed its employees it will aim to build an AI satellite factory on the lunar surface, including an electromagnetic catapult to launch the satellites into space. This is, quite frankly, the worst idea Musk’s cognitively challenged brain has farted out. Even if we are insanely optimistic and generous, this method simply doesn’t work, and it makes Musk look like a fanciful moron. So, what is Musk really doing here?
On the most superficial level, this kind of makes sense.
Moon-based space infrastructure production isn’t a new idea. The Moon is an ideal candidate for In-Situ Resource Utilisation (ISRU). Its regolith (rocks) is rich in oxygen, silicon, aluminium, iron, calcium, magnesium, and titanium, meaning it contains plenty of materials that can be refined relatively easily into useful raw materials. These can be used to build habitats, power systems and other infrastructure on the lunar surface. In theory, this technique is cheaper and more scalable than building these systems on Earth and launching them to the Moon. But the Moon’s gravity is also only 1/6th that of Earth’s, making it far easier to launch objects into space from the Moon than from Earth. As such, everyone from sci-fi authors to NASA engineers has realised that it might be easier to build and launch space infrastructure — such as giant satellite constellations or spacecraft — from the Moon rather than Earth. Indeed, this is one of the main justifications for NASA’s Artemis mission, given that establishing a more permanent presence on the Moon can majorly reduce the Earth launch mass requirements for a Mars mission by using the Moon as a stepping stone.
So, yeah, a Moon city that creates and launches AI data centre satellites sounds like a good idea. But only on the surface. As soon as you scratch even a little, this entire narrative falls apart faster than Musk’s relationships with the mothers of his small army of children.
Why Satellites?
First of all, why launch these satellites from the lunar surface instead of just building and installing data centres on the lunar surface?
On the lunar surface, these data centres could be buried, reducing their exposure to the Sun and lowering cooling demands, while also reducing potentially damaging radiation and enabling easy maintenance by a basic rover. If they are launched into orbit, they are fully exposed to the unfiltered, insanely hot Sun and are out of reach for maintenance.
A study by Meta found that AI data centre chips have a 9% annual failure rate, so being unable to replace or repair them could cause significant losses! Not to mention that failure rates will likely be higher in orbital data centres. The increased exposure to radiation can literally fry electronics. Meanwhile, cooling these systems in the vacuum of space is incredibly difficult, which creates an increased risk of thermal build-up.
If you are going to be building an AI data centre on the Moon, it makes no sense to launch it into space on board satellites.
But, as Musk has done, let’s ignore these facts. Is it even feasible to build and launch satellites from the Moon? Would that be cheaper than building and launching them from Earth? Is this method better than terrestrial AI data centres?
To answer that question, we need to understand SpaceX’s Starship’s capabilities and costs, the setup and mass of an AI data centre satellite, and the various potential options for lunar manufacturing.
Starship
Let’s start with Starship. It is, in my opinion, utterly useless. After 12 test launches, it has only managed to carry 20 tons on a suborbital flight, meaning its current payload to LEO (Low Earth Orbit) is effectively zero.
But let’s be insanely generous and assume that Musk manages to meet Starship’s payload goal of 100 tons to LEO and 21 tons to GTO (Geostationary Orbit). Let’s also be insanely generous and assume a realistic cost per launch of $70 million (as I previously estimated).
Starship still can’t go straight to TLI (trans-lunar injection, or payload to the Moon). It needs to be fully refuelled in LEO by other Starships to deliver a 100-ton payload to the lunar surface. This creates two problems.
Firstly, the in-orbit transfer of Starship’s cryogenic fuel has never been tested, and it is extremely dangerous, with a high chance of a mission-ending catastrophic explosion during refuelling. But for now, let’s remain generous and assume this isn’t a problem. This would mean it would take Starship 17 launches to deliver 100 tons to TLI at a total cost of $1.12 billion.
And even that is a significant underestimate, thanks to the second problem with orbital refuelling: fuel boil-off. In orbit, cryogenic fuel heats and boils, increasing the pressure in its fuel tank. To prevent fuel tanks from failing, evaporated fuel needs to be vented, and we call this process ‘boiling off’. Starship will likely experience a boil-off rate of roughly 1% per day. If we assume a weekly refuelling rate (which is very fast), it would take 110 refuelling missions to bring a Starship in LEO to 89% capacity, at which point it would reach an impassable equilibrium (given that the boil-off rate is the same as refuelling rate). Again, let’s be super generous and assume 89% fuel capacity is enough to take 100 tons to TLI and return Starship to Earth, which is necessary to meet the $70 million launch cost. These launches would take just over two years to complete, and they would cumulatively cost $7.77 billion ($70 million x 111).
All of this allows us to make some basic, wildly optimistic assumptions about Starship’s capability and costs, which I have laid out in a table below.
AI Satellites
So, what is the mass of an AI satellite?
