Moon Base

SpaceX Starship Moon Landing
Hazegrayart

I've been thinking about our plans to go to the moon. SpaceX is making great progress on their Starship, and if things go well, their Super Heavy booster should be flying in a year or two (or three or four). So, barring major calamities we should have established a base on the moon before the end of the decade. 

The big reason for building a moon base is to set up a factory for making rocket fuel. Yes, there is science to be done, but if we can refuel our rockets on the moon then we don't have to carry that fuel up from Earth which means we can carry other, more useful stuff.

Making rocket fuel on the moon is going to be a bit of a trick. Some people are talking about collecting water, but water on the surface is pretty scarce. Some geological exploration might uncover some buried mineral deposits that would work better, but that is going to take some exploring. It might take ten years to find a deposit that could be exploited and it could take like amount of time to develop a technique that could convert that deposit into rocket fuel. 

Now we might be able to do all that exploration using robotic rovers, but I think we would want people there even if it's just for the publicity. Yes, some people are ga-ga over robots, but people in general are more interested in people. And you know there's nothing like the man-on-the-spot to give you a better idea of just exactly what is going on. [Rover Communications Lost] doesn't really tell you much. [Moon Monster Eats Rover] tells you a whole lot more, especially if there are pictures.

What I am getting at is that we are going to need a Moon base for a long time, and that Moon base is going to require regular shipments of supplies and personal. Plus, you aren't going to want to keep people up there for very long. They could certainly survive for a long time, but coming back to Earth is going to be painful. We may not want people to stay there for more than a couple of weeks, so we are going to need a regular shuttle service to rotate personnel.

I'm thinking we are going to need a rocketship to the Moon every week. Ten years would mean 500 launches. If you could get a dozen flights out of a Starship, then you would need to build 40 or 50 them. The logistics of all this would be a bit of a challenge, especially since it would very dependent on which way the political winds were blowing.