Why Elon Outcompetes Everyone | Casey Handmer, Terraform Industries

Ti Morse (0:00)

Today, I'm sitting down with Casey Handmer, the founder and CEO of Terraform Industries. This is going to be the third part in our series of Why Elon Outcompetes Everyone.

And I want to start off with Mass Driver on the Moon. So, can you go through your essay of making the Mass Driver on the Moon work?

Casey Handmer (0:18)

That's a good question. Mass Driver is an interesting one. I worked on high-pollute for a few years, so I actually worked with magnetically accelerated, levitated systems. The thing about the Moon is that the gravity is a bit lower than Earth's, and there's no atmosphere. So you can actually, in principle, you can launch mass from the surface of the Moon into space without a rocket, which in the 70s seemed very attractive, because back then, rockets were seen as very difficult to do. And also, the Moon doesn't have fuel supply. So you could imagine some kind of factory on the surface of the Moon that is processing rocks, has a nuclear power plant, and perhaps receives its power beamed up from Earth, probably even cheaper, and then launches that mass into orbit where you do something with it and make money. So it goes to theory.

And if you're not constrained on the acceleration that you subject these things to, your Mass Driver could be like just less than a thousand feet long, like really short. No, it would shuttle back and forth. So it would be like a machine gun, right? So you think, oh, a rocket launch, you can launch every couple of days if you're really good. No, no, with this Mass Driver, you'd have a shuttle that sits in an electromagnetic track that shuttles back and forth.

So shuttle actually is a component of a loom, like for making cloth, and they shuttle back and forth as well.

And once it starts to slow down, roughly halfway down the track, whatever the payload is will separate from momentum, and then fly the rest of the way however far it's going into space. And then the shuttle will slow down, accelerate in the other direction, and then get reloaded with another wire bale of moon rock or whatever, and shoot itself back into space. And at the speeds involved, it might be like one a second kind of thing. So like...

Ti Morse (2:13)

This shit will be happening fast.

Casey Handmer (2:15)

Well, yeah, I mean, you don't need some like colossal mass driver. Say if you want to do 100 tons a day, you don't need to do like one Starship a day. You do it in 86,400 bite sized pieces of a few kilograms at a time. So the thing is you could actually build this mass driver on the Earth, test it on the Earth, launch it to the moon, maybe do a minimum of assembly or like deployment on the moon and then operate it. It would have to be anchored to the surface quite well because of Newton's Laws.

But it's way easier to do that than, for example, to try and build some like precision aligned structure that's 20 miles long to like accelerate at a more stately pace.

Ti Morse (2:54)

Do you have any idea on what the timeline, you know, we're in 2026 right now, what the timeline is for having that fully built?

Casey Handmer (3:04)

Um, no idea. And it actually, to be really blunt, like the reason you would do this is to provide some of the mass for Starmind, for the orbital AI constellation. But it's hard to imagine, like what set of circumstances would make it like obviously economically preferable to do that, as opposed to building more Starships, more launchpads, more factories on the Earth, where everything's like thousands of times cheaper, and it's launching more stuff from the Earth. And I think the constraint might be something like, if you're launching 10,000 Starships a day, people will say, hey, come on. But like, if they don't, then just keep launching from the Earth.

Because like Starship will ultimately get launch costs into that constellation down to a few hundred bucks a kilogram, which is not very much compared to the costs of a mass-produced high-performance GPU. So if you look at like the embodied cost of the item in orbit, most will be the part that does the thinking, the GPU, and then a bunch of other mass associated with radiators and solar arrays and communication. But even that is not all that much. And almost all those systems are spiritually two-dimensional. So you can fold them up or make them really thin and not very heavy.

So it will be interesting to see.