The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
A future Lunar government could replace the United States as world hegemon. Yes, I'm completely serious.
1 - Previously on The Real McCoy…
I recommend reading my previous article about why I expect the United States to remain a very powerful, if not the most powerful, country a hundred years from now. I ended the article by saying that all things come to an end, and the USA cannot and will not rule forever. So if not China, who?
Remember that the USA has an immense advantage in that it has coasts on both major oceans. In between those coasts is a network of rivers, which provides arable land and cheap shipping. North America is the natural center of naval power. And as long as “he who commands the sea has command of everything,” the USA can expect to be a very powerful country.
Which begs the question: what could make naval power, and therefore Pax Americana, obsolete?
2 - Introduction to Astropolitics
Let’s imagine a future a few hundred years from now. Earth is exhausting its resources, yet it has developed the technology to colonize the Solar System. The asteroid belt is thought to contain lots of rocks with rich minerals. Moreover, the Solar System is chock full of comets with ice we can melt into water or decompose into breathable oxygen and rocket fuel1. Perhaps, in addition to mining, we could move carbon-heavy industries into space too, turning Earth into a planetary national park.
In a future where Earth is importing goods and services from space, naval power is obsolete. If you arrive at Earth carrying goods from the Asteroid Belt, you’d likely establish a parking orbit 400km/250mi above the planet, circling the planet every ninety minutes. From space, any point on the globe is equally accessible (give or take an hour).
So, what’s the most attractive spot in the Solar System for the hub of a spacefaring society?
Space doesn’t work the same way Earth does. We will discuss these differences below, and how they will make astropolitics different than geopolitics.
2.1 - Space travel doesn’t work the way it does on TV
In Star Wars and Star Trek, starships seem to work like a cross between airplanes and seaborne ships. When the Enterprise or Millennium Falcon fly past the screen, we hear a whoosh because the engines are on, as if they were jets.
This is not how it works in real life. Spacecrafts spend less than one percent of their time under power. To go to the Moon, the Apollo command module would “burn” its engines for six minutes, picking up enormous amounts of speed, and then coast towards the Moon for three days.
This is what we in the amateur rocket science community call a maneuver. Each maneuver is carefully planned to be as fuel-efficient as possible. Flying in space is not like Han Solo flying the Millennium Falcon fighter-jet style. Every thrust, burn, and maneuver is carefully and scientifically planned by Mission Control.
When a spacecraft burns its engines, it is spending fuel, and spending its delta-v budget, which can be modeled with the “rocket equation” , as shown above. The key insight of the rocket equation is that fuel has mass : if you want your rocket to go further by adding more fuel, you’ll need to add even more fuel to account for the fuel you added. Adding 100kg of fuel to a 2000kg rocket will add less range than adding 100kg of fuel to a 1000kg rocket.
Finally, the Enterprise would not “whoosh” because, well… there is no sound in space.
2.2 - You cannot turn around on the way to another planet.
There’s a scene in the movie Apollo 13 when, after the fateful explosion, Ed Harris asks if the astronauts can just turn around. He immediately gets yelled at by all the engineers in the conference room. My suspicion is that Ron Howard included this bit for the benefit of the audience, because I doubt that even if a powered abort was discussed, it was discussed for long. If you’re on your way to the Moon, you cannot stop and turn around unless you have unlimited fuel.
To make an analogy: imagine you’re skiing downhill. Halfway down, you’ve realized you dropped your phone somewhere. Is it possible to stop, turn around, and trudge uphill to get it? Yes, but the energies involved in stopping, turning around, and working against gravity are so enormous that you’re probably better off going to the bottom, then taking the next lift back up to look for it on your second run.
When the Apollo command module completed its translunar injection, it wasn’t coasting to the Moon in a straight line; rather, it was falling towards the moon on a curved trajectory. Like skiing, you can easily perform course corrections left and right (and, in space, up and down), but meaningfully changing your trajectory takes a lot of energy.
2.3 - Therefore, you cannot “patrol” space.
There are two reasons why, assuming we’ll still use chemical rockets resembling today’s in the future, there won’t be Star Destroyers or Battlestars patrolling the Solar System like the US Navy does the oceans.
Changing trajectory mid-flight is very expensive (see above).
Planets take days to move, while continents take millions of years. The shortest route from Sydney to Los Angeles is constant. The shortest route from Earth to Mars is constantly in flux.
Since you can’t patrol the shipping lanes of the Solar System (as there are none), I doubt that there would be that much of an incentive to build the sorts of patrol ships we see in popular sci-fi. Tactical spacecraft will likely take on the form of orbital weapons platforms which will operate like space stations but can have engines attached if they need to be deployed to another planetary body.
Most interplanetary spacecraft won’t be large, bulky battleships like the Enterprise or Star Destroyers. Instead, I expect future interplanetary spacecraft will be light, spartan transits for cargo and people, not starfighters and weapons. Discovery from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey is a good bet for how spacecraft could look…
But I think it’s more likely they’ll take on the form of the ISV Venture Star from James Cameron’s Avatar, with the massive engines at the front of the ship, pulling the payload instead of pushing it. This means you don’t need a chassis to keep the aft engines from crushing the forward sections, reducing your spacecraft’s mass. The less mass, the better, because less mass means you need less fuel to propel your spacecraft.
2.4 - Fuel, not access to shipping lanes, is king.
You may be picking up on a theme here: fuel is very, very important for building a civilization in outer space. In fact, I believe that it will be the most important element.
The vast majority of a rocket’s mass is fuel. Whoever controls the fuel controls the universe. Whichever celestial body is the most attractive gas station will be the center of astropolitical power. So where will it be, then?
3 - Earth cannot into space.
Earth will not be the center of astropolitics.
Getting stuff from Earth to orbit is expensive. Think of the large Falcon 9 rocket it took to ship two astronauts from Earth to the ISS. The Falcon 9 weights 550 metric tons at launch and can carry sixteen tons to orbit. Spending 5242 tons of fuel to get 16 tons of fuel to orbit is like spending a fuel truck’s entire payload to deliver a single tank of gas to a destination.
Earth has the highest surface gravity of any rocky body in the Solar System and the third-highest atmospheric pressure3 of any body in the Solar System on which it’s possible to land a spacecraft (the only body worse than Earth for launching rockets is Venus.) Earth is the opposite of the natural center for astropolitical power. Earth as the hub of space trade is as ridiculous a proposition as “the Navy of Switzerland.”
If you want a hub for space trade, you’d look for a celestial body with these properties…
Low gravity, not no gravity. You want gravity to be low so you can easily launch stuff into orbit. However, you don’t want it to be so low you wind up changing your orbital parameters with the reaction control thrusters (the tiny rockets distributed around the spacecraft to rotate it). If we need humans for labor, then low gravity is preferable to no gravity, since being completely weightless leads to your muscles wasting away. This would exclude asteroids and small dwarf planets like Ceres.
Low or no atmosphere. A thin atmosphere is probably ideal since you could perform aerobraking maneuvers4 when landing and injecting into orbit. But no atmosphere is acceptable too, since it’s better than a heavy atmosphere. A heavy and breathable oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere might be nice for us humans, but it introduces all sorts of pesky drag when launching rockets.
Natural resources. No point in building a gas station if there’s no gas. Luckily, water is abundant in the Solar System and can be broken down into hydrogen and oxygen, two components of rocket fuel.
Proximity to Earth. If there’s a disaster and you need replacement personnel, it helps to have a couple billion humans nearby. Plus, if the whole point of this operation is to sell goods to Earth, being close to the mark helps too.
There is one celestial body that fits all four of these criteria.
4 - The Moon is the natural center of astropolitical power.
With its low gravity and lack of atmosphere, the Moon is the perfect gateway from Earth to Mars, the Asteroid Belt, Jupiter, and Saturn. Therefore, whoever controls the Moon controls the Solar System.
Recall the large Falcon 9 required to lift off from Earth, reach orbit, rendezvous with the ISS, and dock. Since there is no atmosphere to render air resistance and lower gravity on the Moon, you don’t need a large rocket to get to orbit. All you would need for two astronauts is the top stage of the Apollo Lunar Module.
We believe there are deposits of ice on the Moon. Ice can be turned into water which can be turned into rocket fuel or breathable oxygen. This makes the Moon a very attractive fuel stop for spacecraft arriving to Earth from Mars or the asteroid belt. If water splitters can be constructed on the surface of the Moon, it would also be an attractive place to refine ice mined from comets. Certainly more attractive than Earth — remember the amount of fuel you have to spend to ship stuff into orbit. Refining water on Earth would cause you to lose 95% of your product when it’s time to ship it back up.
If we discover deposits of iron and aluminum in the lunar regolith, then it could be possible to build large spacecraft on the lunar surface and easily thrust them into orbit. Even if there are no such deposits, the Moon would still be an attractive place to refine ores from asteroids. This would make Lunar spacecraft much higher-quality than Terran spacecraft, which would need to be assembled piece-by-piece in orbit, and therefore take longer to assemble, and would be of worse structural integrity.
I can’t predict who will settle the Moon, and how. The smart money, if you’ve read my previous post, is on America. But who knows? Maybe it could be China. Or India. Or Brazil. Or Japan. Or Russia — which punches far above its weight in space exploration. Any country with a population bigger than 100M as technologically sophisticated as the USA in 1969 could do it.
And who says it has to be a national space program? Perhaps a profitable SpaceX could decide to develop industries on the Moon, and wind up becoming America’s version of the East India Company: a corporation more valuable than the country it’s in.
If there is a truly permanent settlement on the Moon, or somewhere in its orbit, where people live out their whole lives, then as time goes on it could eventually become politically independent from Earth. Just as Australia eventually became independent from Britain; Brazil from Portugal; and Mexico from Spain.
Four hundred years ago when the Mayflower colonists arrived in what is now New England, they couldn’t have anticipated that they would found a country which would eventually replace their homeland on the world stage. Similarly, when Neil Armstrong took his one giant leap for mankind, I doubt he knew he was in a similar position.
Four hundred years from now, human beings will look up at the sky and see the Moon staring down at them. And instead of wondering “what’s up there?” as they have done in the past — they will instead think “our overlords live there. If they turn off the rocket fuel, no more stuff for us.”
But until that day comes, I’m still bullish on the United States being a very powerful country.
5 - Further Reading and Acknowledgements
If you wish to learn more about rocketry and astrophysics, there is no better resource than downloading the video game Kerbal Space Program and playing for a few days. Kerbal will let you internalize orbital mechanics much better than any textbook can.
I want to thank two twitter mutuals: @notsmoking2 for technical feedback, and @__spicywhite for editing.
Liquid Oxygen, and Liquid Hydrogen-2. H2 + O
Per Wikipedia, the dry mass of the upper two stages of a Falcon 9 are 26 tons, so 550 tons minus 26 tells us it needs 524 tons of rocket fuel.
Venus number one at 93x, Titan number two at 1.5x
When approaching a planetary body, to establish an orbit, you need to point your spacecraft backwards and fire your engine to slow down. If the planet has an atmosphere, you can glance its upper layers and use air resistance to slow down for free, saving precious fuel.