Crumbling Infrastructure Threatens Starship Moon Missions

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**SPEAKER_10** (1:30)
To put two astronauts on the moon, SpaceX must launch its Starship rocket at least 15 times just to get enough fuel into orbit. Yet the physical roads that the launch site are so old, they are actively crumbling under the weight of current delivery trucks.

**SPEAKER_11** (1:45)
Right. I mean, we build these vehicles taller than most commercial buildings, and we're driving the parts for them over bridges that have entirely outlived their design life. We focus all of our attention on the rockets and the engineering of the spacecraft, but we just completely ignore the concrete, the pavement, and the plumbing required to actually move them to the pad.

**SPEAKER_10** (2:05)
So the question for you to keep in mind is, can the physical ground support the weight of our space goals, or will the plumbing and pavement break before the rockets do?

**SPEAKER_11** (2:14)
Yeah, it's a huge logistical bottleneck.

**SPEAKER_10** (2:17)
Because to understand why a single lunar mission requires 15 separate launches, you really have to look at the complex logistics of getting a fully-fueled lander to the moon, specifically the cryogenic fluid management problem. The mission architecture is basically a massive orbital relay.
A storage depot is placed in low Earth orbit. Then a fleet of tanker rockets has to launch roughly one every six days just to fill that depot.

**SPEAKER_11** (2:44)
And only after that depot is full can the uncrewed lunar lander launch, dock with the depot, fuel up, and head to lunar orbit to wait for the astronauts.

**SPEAKER_10** (2:54)
Which seems, you know, incredibly tedious.

**SPEAKER_11** (2:57)
It is, but the reason for this relentless sequence really comes down to physics. Both the starship lander and the super heavy booster are powered by liquid oxygen and liquid methane.
To keep those propellants in a liquid state, they have to be maintained at temperatures below negative 244 degrees Fahrenheit.

**SPEAKER_10** (3:13)
Wow, okay.

**SPEAKER_11** (3:14)
Yeah, it's extreme cold. And on Earth, gravity does all the work of keeping those heavy liquids settled at the bottom of a tank, right where the pumps and valves are located.

**SPEAKER_10** (3:21)
Right, but in the microgravity of space, that does not happen. Without gravity, these fuels don't just sit there.

**SPEAKER_11** (3:27)
They really don't.

**SPEAKER_10** (3:28)
Surface tension takes over. The liquid creeps up the walls of the tank, and the rest forms these floating blobs that just sort of disperse throughout the entire volume of the container.

**SPEAKER_11** (3:37)
And that's a nightmare for the plumbing, because if you open a transfer valve while the fuel is in that state, you aren't pumping a dense, predictable liquid. You might just vent empty gas.

**SPEAKER_10** (3:48)
Which is completely useless for fueling the receiving ship.

**SPEAKER_11** (3:51)
Exactly. Or even worse, you might pull in a chaotic mixture of gas and liquid. When that mixture hits the mechanical pumps, it causes cavitation.

**SPEAKER_10** (4:00)
Cavitation, right?

**SPEAKER_11** (4:01)
Yeah. The gas bubbles collapse violently under pressure. It acts like tiny hammers on the metal impellers of the pump. You can destroy the internal plumbing of a spacecraft in seconds if you feed it a gas liquid mixture instead of pure liquid.