Elon Musk wants to launch AI satellites from the Moon using a giant catapult

[midian182]

Why it matters: Elon Musk has long had an apparent obsession with Mars, but he's now pivoted that focus to the Moon – something he called a "distraction" just over a year ago. His latest plan is to build a catapult on the lunar surface and use it to launch AI satellites into space.

At an internal all-hands meeting this week, Musk laid out an idea that sounds like something ripped straight from a SF novel: build a massive factory on the Moon that manufactures AI satellites and launches them into space using a giant catapult. It's part of his plan to create an orbiting AI data center that uses satellites powered by the sun.

The idea is to leverage the Moon's low gravity and vacuum environment to drastically reduce the energy needed to get hardware into orbit. However, the minimum escape velocity required for orbit is still around 3,800 MPH or five times the speed of sound, so launched satellites would need to withstand acceleration forces around 10,000 g or more.

Instead of firing rockets off Earth's deep gravity well, Musk wants a lunar infrastructure, including a so-called mass driver – an electromagnetic launcher that hurls payloads into space at high speeds without burning tonnes of propellant. The concept of mass drivers has been studied for years as an alternative space launch technique.

According to people familiar with the meeting – audio of which was reported by The New York Times – the intention isn't just to shoot satellites up from a lunar base.

Musk claims these satellites would help xAI, his artificial intelligence company now embedded with SpaceX, to compete by giving it unprecedented AI compute infrastructure and connectivity beyond Earth. "You have to go to the Moon," he reportedly told staff.

Musk is no stranger to talking about big plans without including the details. For the moon concept, he gave no engineering roadmap, no cost estimate, no timeline, and extremely little sense of the real logistical challenge of building industrial capability on an airless, resource-scarce world.

This moon catapult vision also arrives at a moment of internal turbulence for Musk's empire. xAI has seen several co-founder departures recently, and SpaceX is reportedly eyeing a blockbuster IPO. Some industry observers are questioning whether this lunar pitch is visionary strategy or a high-concept distraction timed to take attention off the leadership shakeups.

There's also the bigger shift in Musk's space priorities. For years his priority was Mars – the Red Planet as humanity's insurance policy. Now, he's openly talking about self-sustaining lunar cities and lunar manufacturing hubs as shorter-term stepping stones, partly because Moon missions are easier to launch frequently and cheaper than missions to Mars.

Whether Musk's mass-driver dream becomes an engineering reality or stays one of his unlikely concepts remains to be seen.

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Elon Musk wants to launch AI satellites from the Moon using a giant catapult

 

[VitalyT]

Musk is no stranger to talking about big plans without including the details

That is the most politically correct way to put it, describing Musk and his ideas.
Most people would reduce it to simpler terms.

 

[Theinsanegamer]

The cannon itself doesnt seem that crazy. No atmosphere, limited gravity, wouldnt take anywhere near the energy of launching from earth.

The obvious problem......how do you get the satellites to the moon in the first place? Are you building them in a space station? If so....why not launch from the station?

That is the most politically correct way to put it, describing Musk and his ideas.

As silly as his ideas may be, devoid of detail, its far more refreshing then the endless "we cant do that, we cant build that, theres nothing we can do" pessimism that permeates society today.

 

[Beerfloat]

In the way that ketamine is refreshing. But most people eventually come down.

 

[unoficialoficial]

I recall in the past Coca-Cola wanting to laser-project its logo onto the moon for promotion, but being stopped by regulations. SpaceX could do something comparable while avoiding those regulations. Just send two (Orion & Lyra) specially modified Optimus robots (with embedded solar panels and scientific gear) to the moon. Having two allows one to fix the other if needed. They could perform measurements and build simple structures (like a circular catapult). It's like the car that was sent into orbit, but different.

 

[user556]

Maybe in 50 years.

 

[Lew Zealand]

TechBro comes up with idea. It's not original, fungible, or feasible but all he needs is a few ignorant wealthy investors to keep the greenbacks flowing in until the next TechBro idea.

 

[Vrmithrax]

Hate to be that guy but...

Is it a catapult, or a mass driver? Because those are 2 VERY different things, with wildly different mechanisms, and seem to be used interchangeably throughout the article...... Basic research seems to fail more and more these days.

 

[Kashim]

As silly as his ideas may be, devoid of detail, its far more refreshing then the endless "we cant do that, we cant build that, theres nothing we can do" pessimism that permeates society today.

Conservatives love fantastical ideas that end up going nowhere. You know, like all those hilarious stories in the bible about water getting turned into wine, talking snakes, magical saviors that come back from the dead, senior citizens that build giant arks, people who live to be hundreds of years old, etc. This fits in exactly with that nonsense, but in space!

You people don't like to hear harsh realities about what we CANNOT do, you'd rather hear far fetched nonsense that will go exactly nowhere. What happened to Musk's idea for a hyperloop that goes from New York to LA? Nothing. What happened to his ridiculous idea about going to Mars? Nothing now, and nothing in the future. We're not going to Mars in the next 20 year or the next 50 years, PERIOD.

We haven't even LANDED on the moon in nearly 6 decades and NASA is having serious problems getting us there. But hey, Musk is going to build a massive infrastructure on the moon and launch satellites from there with a giant slingshot. Totally going to happen. After that he's going to build a space elevator to Heaven and a bridge to Venus.

 

[Plutoisaplanet]

The cannon itself doesnt seem that crazy. No atmosphere, limited gravity, wouldnt take anywhere near the energy of launching from earth.

The obvious problem......how do you get the satellites to the moon in the first place? Are you building them in a space station? If so....why not launch from the station?

His idea would be to build them on the moon because you need raw resources to build satellites. All of this is far off stuff, so first SpaceX has to get Starship launching to orbit reliably. They've been testing new V3 designs and plan to launch the first vehicle in a month. Starship V3 (or block 3) is the vehicle they plan to refuel in Earth's orbit and fly back and forth from the moon.

The other perquisite to building satellites on the Moon would be developing robots to do physical labor that humans can do. They don't need to even be autonomous, although it'd be helpful considering light takes about 1.3 seconds to travel from the Earth to the Moon.

 

[ScottSoapbox]

Except all that weight would go by orbit to reach the moon and then come back. Totally wasteful and foolish.

The only way you get around that would be mining enough resources from the moon to offset the weight of all the mining equipment needed to mine on the moon. So totally foolish.

 

[Rudyduu]

As silly as his ideas may be, devoid of detail, its far more refreshing then the endless "we cant do that, we cant build that, theres nothing we can do" pessimism that permeates society today.

There is a massive difference between an idea that makes sense and one that doesn't make any sense. It's not pessimism, it's the real world. Saying a proposed plan doesn't make any sense and isn't feasible then outlining the reasons why is legitimate criticism. Any person making such wild proposals without showing why it's better and how it's possible is just trying to get attention and nothing else.

Saying anything is possible when it just isn't doesn't make any sense. What's the point of deploying the materials to build satellites to the moon to then redeploy it from the moon to an orbit around earth? What's the point of proposing factories on the moon to build and launch data center satellites into orbit around the earth when no one has deployed any data center into space, yet?

Here are the reasons it's dumb:
- Costs: factories are expensive, data centers are expensive, satellites are expensive, putting anything into space is expensive. Developing and deploying a factory that builds and launches data center satellites from the moon would be magnitudes more expensive than just building data centers on earth along with the infrastructure to power and cool them. For the price of putting on moon factory produced data center satellite into space you could probably build 50-100 full sized AI data centers on earth along with the power infrastructure to support them.
- Outdated tech: by the time the factory is completed on the moon technology on earth would have moved forward. They would be deploying satellites with 10-year-old technology if not even older by the time the factory was able to actually build and deploy satellites.
- Maintenance: What maintains the factory? What maintains the datacenter satellites? What maintains the launcher? How much will that maintenance cost?
- Launcher: is it even feasible to launch an object from the moon to the earth? No one has put any object into orbit on earth from a similar launcher or has even tried. Just the launcher would take ten years or more to develop, deploy, test and put into service.

 

[KnightSayNI]

Conservatives love fantastical ideas that end up going nowhere. You know, like all those hilarious stories in the bible about water getting turned into wine, talking snakes, magical saviors that come back from the dead, senior citizens that build giant arks, people who live to be hundreds of years old, etc. This fits in exactly with that nonsense, but in space!

You people don't like to hear harsh realities about what we CANNOT do, you'd rather hear far fetched nonsense that will go exactly nowhere. What happened to Musk's idea for a hyperloop that goes from New York to LA? Nothing. What happened to his ridiculous idea about going to Mars? Nothing now, and nothing in the future. We're not going to Mars in the next 20 year or the next 50 years, PERIOD.

We haven't even LANDED on the moon in nearly 6 decades and NASA is having serious problems getting us there. But hey, Musk is going to build a massive infrastructure on the moon and launch satellites from there with a giant slingshot. Totally going to happen. After that he's going to build a space elevator to Heaven and a bridge to Venus.

As farfetched as say gender-swapping through butchery? Where's that fetus going to gestate? On your 3d printer?

 

[godrilla]

In the way that ketamine is refreshing. But most people eventually come down.

Imagine if Musk gets K holes by default but some are talking about a 3000 old scripture about sees being split in half, boy slaying giants to become king. I guess if you allow some to rewrite history the Manhattan project will be considered a fairy tale one day.

 

[Shaitan]

As far-fetched as say gender-swapping through butchery? Where's that fetus going to gestate? On your 3d printer?

Not enough coffee, so excuse my sloppy post.
Do you realize that there's a difference between a mental... state/feeling of an individual(which has a small circle of people he/she/whatever may influence) vs a story that affects millions by beliefs in the name of which other millions could and have been displaced/hated/ oppressed?
If you can ostracize an individual based on a set of beliefs in a book, it's a slippery slope to go ahead and base an entire empire based on a certain religion. Please, do tell what effects the "Holy" Eastern Roman Empire had on the world. Or the Islamic Ottoman one?
Gender-swapping never burned witches, persecuted other beliefs with death and torture, mass genocide or anti-semitism. Not that I'm a fan of that, but I'm neither a fan of a fairy in the sky, as no one was able to explain to me why do we have newborn with bone marrow cancer ("sins of the parents"?!), or animals that suffer (they can't sin), so then the fairy in the sky is either not caring or hateful towards living things.
Anyway, far-right conservatives or far-left radicals are a mental illness equally.
It's not the place to debate here over the benefits, or lack thereof, of capitalism, socialism or, God forbid, communism. What we can all see is that communist countries, be it Russia, China or Cambodia are the birthplace of one of the most awful and genocidal regimes ever seen concerning the number of victims(not to dismiss the far-right regimes of Imperial Japan before and during WW2 or the Nazi Germany).
Yeah, no, thanks, no state religion is "good". F that.