SpaceX have a long relationship with the US Air Force harking back to the first Falcon 1 flight in 2006. Since then Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy proved so competitive the Air Force’s incumbent supplier, United Launch Alliance (ULA), felt compelled to discontinue their entire range of launch vehicles and develop Vulcan Centaur to consolidate cost. More recently, SpaceX managed to send thousands of Starlink terminals to Ukraine within days of the invasion, after Russian hackers disabled all their existing Viasat terminals. In fact SpaceX moved so swiftly it took the Air Force 15 months to catch up and pay for Starlink services to Ukraine, who have become a shield against Russia for NATO countries. Nowadays the Air Force’s space activities have largely transferred to the US Space Force, a far more agile service that aims to accelerate space utilization, which aligns perfectly with SpaceX’s goals and mode of operation.
Hence SpaceX’s strong relationship should ascend to new heights as the Space Force finds its wings, driven by China’s inexorable rise as a space power. Chinese taikonauts are all serving members of The People's Liberation Army (PLA), which sends a stark message if they manage to land on the moon before the US. By effectively ‘invading’ the moon they could claim it as sovereign Chinese territory and gain control of all cislunar space in the medium to longterm.
Moon Strategy
Following the Apollo moon landings many experts assumed our moon was a desolate place, devoid of any appreciable natural resources. However, more recent studies show the permanently shadowed craters at the poles have an abundance of volatile materials, such as water, carbon dioxide and monoxide, frozen into the regolith (estimated 600 million tonnes of water at the north pole alone). These constitute all the raw materials required to produce methane and oxygen propellant in vast quantities, using the continuous solar power supplied to the poles. Methalox is now the go-to propellant system for most progressive launch companies, making this find of extraordinary value. Large quantities of propellant are required to go anywhere in space so manufacturing it in a high orbit, such as the moon, should enable far greater and longer duration space activities. Realistically any advanced nation can visit the moon but in situ propellant production will allow them to base there permanently. Hence, whoever controls this critical resource will control the cislunar sphere; simply put: methalox propellant will become the oil of outer space.
However, propellant isn’t the only reason to go to the moon, otherwise it would be a circular argument. In the future the space economy will devour considerable amounts of resources, many of which can be derived from the moon. For example, there’s no point sending thousands of tons of oxygen from Earth, when oxygen is the most common element on the moon (at nearly 42%). In addition, asteroid debris litters the lunar surface, likely containing many rare earths and metals (titanium, copper, gold, platinum etc) which could prove invaluable to the space economy. So propellant production allows access to lunar resources, which could lead to the space economy becoming a Chinese monopoly...
US Fightback
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