Entering the Era of Lunar Infrastructure

There's a saying that the Apollo era was all about “flags and footprints on the moon,” and that's no longer what's driving nations. Now, we're moving into the era of construction projects for infrastructure; first on the moon and then on Mars. We learned in early 2023 that Blue Origin had been working on infrastructure-related programs since 2021 in a program called Blue Alchemist that was intended to the take the lunar regolith and manufacture things on site; including making working (if rather small) photoelectric generator cells. 

Today, Payload tells us of a startup infrastructure company called Ethos Space Resources working on ways to turn the regolith into something like poured concrete in its versatility and the ability to work with it. They see this as the key to entering the phase of “launch pads and gas pumps.” The idea is to melt the regolith, separate out the oxygen bound in it for other uses, separate out useful metals and other components, eventually using the remainder to cast much like concrete for launch pads, roads and ramps.

Two of the company’s three founders were early SpaceX alums who helped build the launch giant’s earliest pads and vehicles. 

Ethos founders:

• Ross Centers (CEO): A Colorado School of Mines alum specializing in space resources.
• Jeff Overbeek (COO): A 12-year SpaceX veteran who founded the company’s launch reliability group and helped build Falcon 9 launch sites.
• Brogan BamBrogan (VP of customer ops & integration): BamBrogan was employee #23 at SpaceX, where he helped develop Falcon and Dragon.

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“We are starting with the very first infrastructure on the Moon, which is a landing pad, making round trip access to the Moon reliable and affordable,” Centers told Payload. “We will build the pad and liquid oxygen from the lunar regolith to provide a place to land.”

Liquid oxygen from rocks? It helps to know that analysis has shown that oxygen makes up 45% of lunar rocks by weight. The regolith is melted using electrical power, after the oxygen and other materials are separated out, it forms a strong material that can be used for a landing/launch pad.

Ethos has successfully produced the concrete-like rock in a $2M simulated lunar environment, and has tested the material at its facility under the fiery power of a rocket’s breath. “We were surprised how well it held up. We knew from lab testing that our material was stronger than concrete, but we didn’t know how it would hold up under a hot, violent rocket flame,” Centers said. 

The company said that unlike concrete–-which can fracture and throw off big chunks of material—a rocket plume melts the glass and self-heals any fractures.

Ethos provides this image of their concept of operation in very high level overview.

The need for the generation of liquid oxygen for fuel and the poured regolith launch/landing pads all come down to the Moon being a Harsh Mistress, if I can borrow that. Perhaps I should say Spaceflight is a Harsh Mistress. To get back from the moon, a ship needs to carry the weight of that fuel all the way  to the moon, and its launch vehicle has to be big enough to launch that fuel - or else there needs to be a fleet of tankers carrying fuel to orbit to fuel the ships going the next step to the moon. Making the fuel for the return on the moon vastly simplifies that situation.

Imagine a robotic, instrument-laden version of this melting/refining tank that could get to a preferred landing location on the moon, and create a large landing pad that the Starship or other lander could then just land on. Just having a level surface to land on instead of the slope of a crater most likely would have kept both SLIM and Odysseus IM-1 from tipping over when they landed. Think of this system being able to create LOX and keep it in liquid state for the lander for when it's needed. 

“Mass to the Moon is almost prohibitively expensive right now,” said Centers. “When you’re doing a round trip mass, that’s even more expensive because you have to bring all the fuel to get back to Earth afterward.” 

“It is orders of magnitude cheaper to build infrastructure on the Moon using local resources.”

While two of the founders mentioned above are former SpaceX guys, they see their ideas as being useful to everyone.

Ethos has partnered with Astrolab, a recent awardee of NASA’s lunar terrain contract, to facilitate lunar operations and the mobility needed to build a large pad.

How to build a pad on the Moon:

• Astrolab’s FLEX rover will deploy several power cargo boxes, measuring 1.5 meters by 2 meters, at various locations around the designated lunar pad construction site.
• The rover will tow a heating trailer that melts lunar regolith behind it, harnessing the energy from the deployed power units.

The byproduct is a hardened, concrete-like pad. 

As first-movers on lunar infrastructure, the company sees its future offerings expanding into other resource domains like metals, power, and water.

With luck, it might look like this in around 10 years. Image credit Ethos Space Resources