The document summarizes the advantages and opportunities of establishing sustainable lunar settlements. It outlines that the moon has resources like oxygen and metals, is very close to Earth with a trip taking only 3 days, and has permanently shadowed craters that contain water ice. Establishing infrastructure on the moon would make accessing other parts of the solar system easier due to lower gravity and acceleration needs. While many technical challenges remain around areas like mining water, with the right conditions and continued progress in reducing launch costs, a self-sustaining lunar economy could develop through opportunities in areas like solar power, radio astronomy, asteroid mining, and serving as a spaceport.

1. Paving the Way to
Sustainable Lunar Settlement
Michael Mealling Starbridge Venture Capital, Waypaver Foundation, Moon Society

2. The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little
they really know about what they imagine they can design.
— Friedrich August von Hayek

3. The Moon What is special about the moon?

4. Advantages
● Very close - Crewed missions take about three days
● No atmosphere - free vacuum for industrial processes
● No significant geological processes - everything that lands there stays there
● Radio silent - far side is the quietest place in our solar system
● Resources - lunar soil contains oxygen, silicon, iron, calcium, aluminum, etc.
● Water - ice in permanently shadowed craters

5. Once you get to earth orbit, you’re halfway to anywhere in the solar system.
— Robert A. Heinlein

6. Space Travel 101
● Moving from one place to another requires acceleration, or Δv, which means “change in
velocity”. It is represented as kilometers per second (km/s).
● Δv in space requires a rocket of some type to provide that acceleration. How efficient
that rocket is determines how much fuel you need.
● The rocket must accelerate not only the payload, but all the propellant the rocket is
about to use—or will ever use in the future.
● The relationship between the intended Δv of the payload and the fuel necessary to
achieve that is exponential.

7. Image courtesy Dennis Wingo
Space Travel Is About Acceleration and Gravity
13.8 km/s
~4 km/s
Most of our
communications
satellites live here
Δv from Earth to GEO: 9.5 + 4.3 = 13.8 km/s
Δv from Moon to GEO: 2.52 + 1.38 = 3.9 km/s
3.5 times easier to get to GEO from the Moon than Earth

8. Falling Down The Gravity Well
● Falling down a gravity well is easier than climbing out of one.
● Remember, the relationship between Δv and fuel is exponential.
● This makes anything on the Moon inherently less expensive than anything launched
from the Earth.
● United Launch Alliance’s “CisLunar 1000” program projects that, with all infrastructure
costs added in, this will reduce cost to geosync by 40% resulting in billions in launch
cost savings.

9. Solar Power
● In many locations lunar soil contains all of the
materials necessary to fabricate thin film solar
cells.
● The generated power can be beamed to LEO and to
the Earth using microwaves.
● Built entirely robotically using dozens, not hundreds
of launches.
● No problems with clouds/rain

10. Radio Astronomy On The Far Side
● The far side of the Moon is the quietest place in the
Solar System for radio astronomy.
● We are a noisy bunch.
● 3D printed and robotically maintained observatories
would be economically competitive with terrestrial
observatories.

11. Mining Asteroids On The Moon
● The Moon endured the same Late Heavy Bombardment of
asteroids that the Earth endured 4 billion years ago.
● This is where Earth’s most valuable mineral resources come
from.
● All of those resource are still on the Moon undisturbed by
erosion and tectonic activity.
● Lunar magnetic anomalies may be large nickel-iron asteroids

12. Current Plans What is happening now?

13. Launch Becoming Cheaper
$ 20,000
15,000
10,000
5,000
Shuttle Ariane 5 Soyuz-FG H - IIB Long
March 3B
Falcon 9PSLV Falcon
Heavy
Launch Cost: $ per Kg
● Launch is price elastic. E.g. the
more the cost drops the more
demand grows.
● Reusability proven possible.
● Private capital and commercial
methods lower operational
costs.

14. Spacecraft Are Shrinking
● Both size and cost are shrinking.
● Cubesats are the fastest growing segment of satellite
development and launch.
● In 2015 STMSat-1, built by elementary students at the St.
Thomas More Cathedral School in Arlington, Virginia, was
launched from the International Space Station.

15. Political Will
● Whitehouse redirecting NASA back to the Moon as a stepping stone to Mars.
● NASA is building a Lunar ‘gateway’ station.
● NASA directed to use Public Private Partnerships for lunar transportation and surface
operations.
● Congress is already stripping some commercial language from legislation.
● (You should probably call your representatives)

16. Private Companies Developing Infrastructure
Astrobotic
Masten Space iSpace
Shackleton Energy
PT Scientists
Moon
Express

17. Economics How is this sustainable?

18. “Developing markets is a lot like gardening. You don’t get to
place the leaves. It’s not bonsai. If you put a bunch of seeds
down, you water things the right way, you maintain the right
conditions, and you have to have a certain amount of faith,
plants will spring up.”
— Jeff Greason

19. Flight Rate
● Launch prices are elastic. The more we fly the cheaper it becomes.
● Falcon Heavy, Vulcan, and New Glenn have or will have the ability to land commercially
significant infrastructure on the Moon within five years.
● The transport of water and/or fuel from EML1 to LEO and back creates a cislunar
transportation network that is also price elastic.
● If launch to LEO prices drop to $1000/kg and a cislunar transportation service is
developed for fuel, then other commercial services become viable.

20. The First Customer
● The most important development is finding the first customer.
● ULA is writing Letters of Intent to purchase fuel in LEO for $3000/kg
● Predicated on a ULA customer willing to use LEO refueling for geosync or beyond
missions.
● There is a role for Government to act as an anchor customer similar to the Air Mail Act
and the Pacific Railroad Acts.
● Commercial ISS resupply and Commercial Crew programs are successful precedents.

21. Gardening Not so fast...

22. Details Are Discovered
● The Integrated Space Plan from 1989
● Nothing happened according to plan
● Nowhere in the plan will you find the “Give
birth to Elon Musk”
● Plan for risk
● Plan for disruption
● Plan to fail
● Create the right conditions

23. Things We Don’t Know
● Where are economically useful concentrations of water?
● How to reliably navigate on the surface?
● How to separate the water from the soil?
● How/where to convert the water to cryogenic liquid oxygen and hydrogen?
● How to communicate with infrastructure on the far side?
● Are humans necessary?
● How do you power rovers that are in permanent shadow?
● How do you prevent waste heat from spacecraft from sublimating the water you are
mining?

24. ● How robust are robotic mechanisms at -366°F?
● How does a rover traverse down into a two mile deep crater?
● How do you survive the two week lunar night?
● How do robotic systems handle temperature swings from +260 °F to - 280 °F?
● What is the radiation flux at the lunar poles?
● What does highly abrasive lunar dust do to mining systems?
● How do you build a cryogenic capable refueling tug?
● How do you build a depot that minimizes cryogenic boil-off?
● What is the legal regime for resources extracted from the Moon?
● Who is the anchor tenant?
● If that anchor tenant is a Government what happens if budgets are cut?
● What happens if there is a recession?
● Etc…

25. In investing, what is comfortable is rarely profitable.
— Robert Arnott

26. Not Knowing Is OK
● In 1995 there was no plan for scaling the Internet to the entire planet.
● But the right conditions existed.
○ Netscape
○ Alta Vista
○ Wikipedia
○ Google
○ Facebook
○ Netflix
○ Amazon
○ CMGI (!)
○ Pets.com (!!!)
● Approaching 10% of global GDP

27. The Opportunities Are In The Process
Answering each question is a challenging
technical problem that produces knowledge that
can be commercialized on its own.
Each step doesn’t just retire risk, it creates
markets and capital that set the conditions for
answering the next.
Development/Diffusion
Time
Bearings capable of 1000
Kelvin gradients
Ultra-wide band radar for
navigation
Water extraction in arid
environments
Ultra high bandwidth laser
communications in space
Profitable lunar
industry

28. Opportunities
● Investing
● Teaching
● Media & Marketing
● Engineering
● Policy & Law
Build A Company
● Autonomous Robotics/Self Assembly
● Cryogenic Materials
● Autonomous Industrial Processes
● Power Storage
● Wireless Power Transmission
● Delay Tolerant Networking (IoT)
● Low Cost Spacecraft Systems
● Dust Mitigation In Microgravity/Vacuum
● 3D Printing Using In Situ Feedstocks
● Guidance/Navigation/Control w/o GPS
● Low Cost Radiation Hardened Electronics
● Directed Radiative Heat Transfer
● Telerobotic Lunar Surface Games & VR
● Resource Claims Perfection Using ROVs
● Insurance
● Commodities Exchanges
● Cryogenic Fluid Transfer and Lossless Containment
● Low/No Gravity Fractionating Processes
● Tour Guides

29. No One Cares About Your Technology!
● Do NOT create a zero-gravity pen. Use a pencil.
● There MUST be a Customer with a Problem before you begin to build anything.
● Be very aware of your Customer’s Customer and your Vendor’s Vendors.
● The space industry is going through puberty. Keep a cash reserve and be prepared to
move quickly.
● Find and sell to multiple different markets. Especially if there is a terrestrial one.
● If you think you have what it takes, prepare for the NYSA Shark Tank in November!

30. If this stuff was easy everyone would be doing it.
— Michael Mealling

31. Michael Mealling
+1-678-640-6884
Starbridge Venture Capital
michael@starbridgevc.com
Waypaver Foundation
mmealling@waypaverfoundation.org
Moon Society
president@moonsociety.org