Elon Musk's Moon Factory Vision and the Science Behind Making It Real

On Friday, Elon Musk's rocket company SpaceX launched an initial public offering, and it broke the record, becoming the largest IPO ever. In the leadup to it, Musk outlined a series of ambitious goals for the company, including putting AI data centers in space and building factories on the moon. These are amazing visions, but can they become reality? Joining me now is Janna Leven, an astrophysicist and professor of physics and astronomy at Barnard College. Welcome, Jana. Thanks so much for having me. So, tell us, you know, what's the science behind

some of these things getting to the moon? How difficult would it be to set up manufacturing facilities on the moon? Yeah. I mean, it there's a measure of difficulty. It's going to be extremely challenging, yet I think it's achievable. look. Okay. Humans are very vulnerable on the moon. They're vulnerable to solar winds and solar radiation. And one of the things that's going to have to happen is to build a protective structure as well as harnessing solar energy and finding water, which we think exists in ice form deep in these craters on the moon. So, all

of these things have to come together uh to make a viable space station. How long would it take to get to the moon? to get to the technological stage where we're able to actually inhabit the moon for long stretches. I think it's really hard to project. I think they know they admit in the prospectus that SpaceX released that it's going to rely on technologies that don't yet exist. uh ideally in a fantasy world in that kind of sci-fi future, we send robots there to build a lot of the infrastructure so it's then safe for humans to move in and begin to take up the rest

of the charge. Are data centers in space an easier thing to imagine? I mean, I think about it, it's like the International Space Station in a sense, right? Yes, data centers in space are easier to imagine. There's a real sense that we could do that sooner and faster. Ironically, one of the problems is that they don't cool off. So, right now, the data centers on Earth boil lakes, right? It's not something we like as the climate impact, the negativity of that. Uh, in space, they will obviously not be having that kind of ramification on the biosphere. But it's hard to

cool in a vacuum of space. Data centers have huge cooling systems on Earth to cool them down, right? Why couldn't you put those on in space? Well, it's it's more expensive. It's more stuff to go up there. It's more stuff to break. To me, Mars seems the biggest uh lift in the sense it just feels like and I say this with my enormous expertise is based on the movie The Martian, which is pretty good. It seems very hard to live there. You have to be in a in an astronaut uniform all the time. You're a suit all the time. You have to grow stuff in massive self-contained

medically sealed tents. M it takes months maybe years to get there. Months. So how you could be. So this just seems to me like you have there have to be some big upside to doing it. Yes. Why are we going to Mars? Part of it is just blind ambition just the human compulsion to travel to explore. Uh it's not going to be an alternative to Earth. Sometimes it's sold that way in this but that's kind of comic book. Here we have this amazing, wonderful planet and has a great magnetic field and a wonderful atmosphere and it has oceans and it's teeming with life and as far as we know

it's the only example of life in our solar system. Uh we might go to Mars and find microbes. Um and yet we think we're going to terraform an entire planet when we can't quite cap the human impact that we've had on our own biosphere here. Now, the last time we set ourselves at a great deadline uh was Kennedy saying we were going to get to the moon. The difference, it seems to me, is then it was a government project. It was a kind of collective American project. Everything I've just described is essentially going to be done by SpaceX or another private company. What

are the implications of that? I don't think we can completely unpack them yet. I think there's some of that's that's uh exciting because in because we know that individual industry can be very ambitious in a way that a government cannot. NASA can never tolerate the kind of failures that for instance SpaceX is comfortable with. Things blow up in the launchpad. They just go back. They're not beholden to the taxpayer. They're not um they're not restricted by uh by being overly cautious. What's terrifying is where does where does science fit into this? and where

where does uh the sense of space as a commons fit into this? And that I think can be quite alarming. It's it's also uh will financial incentive completely overpower all the kind of dreaming that human beings have done just to devise ways of going to space. Everything that uh space fairing technologies rely on were all the dreamers. you know, back to Kepler, back to Galileo, they were simply finding orbits, understanding celestial mechanics, looking at the celestial bodies, thinking about quantum mechanics in the later years. Where is all that going to go?

Is it only going to be money and is it now going to be CEOs looking at quarterly returns given that this is now going to be a public company, right? Or will there be an attempt to say we're going to redirect some of this to exploration to science, theoretical, experimental, observational science just for science's sake. People used to talk about the usefulness of useless knowledge. And if you don't have that, you never have the technology to even think about going to Mars. You really are almost uniquely qualified to talk about this because you are

you have a PhD in uh aerospace engineering. you were a physics major. You started this nonprofit and for-profit to do architecture in space. The question um everyone has, I think, is what are we going to learn from going to space that's going to help us here? Or is this just an adventure? This is a wonderful point to think about for the future of space infrastructure. Can we actually build really big scale structures in space for the public good? So what are people on Earth going to get out of it even before we think about your lifestyle that you might have in space? One of the

things that we're working on at Aurelia Institute is the idea of an orbital biolab. So a really large scale structure way bigger than you could fit in your biggest rocket that does microgravity research. So this is basically looking at biology when it's floating in orbit. Really profoundly different behavior than what you get on the ground. And there's amazing potential for cancer and Alzheimer's drug treatment discovery, uh, new types of protein crystallization, and maybe even prosthetics like artificial retinas manufactured in space. I've always thought that manufacturing

of a certain kind could be more easily done in space. Uh, it's less environmentally bad, but you know, it have to be done obviously by robots and things like that, right? How much of that is a pipe dream? How much of it could actually happen? This is actually also one of my favorite I think promises for the space industry. When you're floating, you get much more pure crystals. And so there's manufacturing in the biology domain. There's also manufacturing for fiber optic cable. When you're floating, you don't have any gravity or you're not experiencing gravity. So you could

do an infinitely long extruded beam and start to build and manufacture really incredible structures in space that you cannot make on Earth. And so that's absolutely something that our ecosystem kind of between Aurelia Institute, the nonprofit side where we do the research and rendevous robotics where we do the actual scaling up of the space infrastructure. This is definitely a domain that we're actively working on is in space manufacturing and construction kind of large. So how much of this is you know science fiction and how much of it is this is a reasonable uh prospect

that 5 to seven years from now some of this stuff will actually be happening. This is the really amazing inflection point that we have partly thanks to the drop in launch costs really dramatic um drop in cost to get to space because of SpaceX. because of SpaceX, right? With Starship, it's anticipated that the cost per kg might be around $200 a kilogram compared to about $1,500 or $2,000 a kilogram today and $50,000 a kilogram under the NASA shuttle program. It's a huge moment uh to capture a lot of activity. So 5 to seven years, what are we looking at? We want our orbital

biolab module that Aurelia Institute is building in partnership with the university consortium to basically protect open science in orbit. We think we're going to be ready to attach to one of those commercial space destinations in 2030 2031. So 4 to 5 years for AI data centers. One of the profound benefits, even though it has a lot of technical challenges, is you would get that carbon footprint off of the Earth from all the heat generation from the electronics, and then you also get the benefit of raw unfiltered sunlight energy cuz you're above the atmosphere, right? So, you're

getting really good free energy. I think that those two factors and the idea that we now have Starship and New Glenn coming online, you're going to see a lot more investment of capital into this domain of building big space structures. And we're super excited to support that at Rendevu Robotics as well. So let me ask a skeptical question which is the thing about space outside of satellites which are really more about what they provide for us at Earth. Weather Yeah. Exactly. But if you look at space travel, it has largely been a, you know, kind of the g whiz, oh my gosh, we can do

it. Yes. rather than stuff that has actually benefited human beings that much. Um I you know is it something that we are going to see major uh you know is this a new inflection point or am I misinformed? So what's really been the stying factor for the last 50 years is space to your point was the domain of military defense and government exorbitantly expensive. We're about to be able to scale up things like artificial retinas in orbit for the benefit of life on Earth. Kruda, drugs like, you know, cancer, life-saving drugs from space. We can now do it at a much bigger

scale for humanity because this drop in cost to actually access the space environment. The final example um that is always in the back of my mind is the image that was taken of Earth on Apollo 8 in 1968 on Christmas Eve Earth. Stuart Brand put it on the cover of the whole earth catalog and that helped to launch the environmental movement in the United States in the 70s. So there's both a pragmatic we can get real science insights out of the international space station out of the next wave of space stations. Now it's cheap enough to do that at scale better than we have done.

But there's also a philosophical benefit, I think, for humanity of expanding our concentric circles of awareness as a species and coming to really appreciate Earth as the best home we will ever have even as we explore further out. And so I think the space program has already shown that they can really do that. They can really move hearts and minds about appreciating this beautiful blue marble planet that we are living on. All right, on that note of optimism, Ariel, pleasure to have you on. Thank you so much. It's such an honor.