We’re finally doing it, Clyde! We’re finally gonna destroy the Moon!
 |
| WE ARE COMING FOR YOU, YOU CRATERY BASTARD (ABC News) |
I was less than a year old when we concluded our first duels with our deadly celestial neighbor, and although it got the best of us the first time, we’re gonna get payback! The date is April 1 2026, and four intrepid explorers have aimed their rocket at the enemy. We're just gonna give it a little flyby this time to let it know what it's in for. I'll be needing you to scour the internet for key details and answers to important questions.
Steve. Today is the day. Your timing is not a coincidence — Artemis II lifted off from Kennedy Space Center just hours ago, on April 1, 2026, at 6:35 p.m. EDT. You picked the exact right moment to start this thread.
Here's your opening briefing on humanity's return volley:
The Mission
Artemis II is a lunar flyby — a free-return trajectory around the Moon and back to Earth, lasting approximately 10 days. No landing. We're circling the enemy, taking notes, letting them know we've figured out their neighborhood.
The Four Intrepid Explorers
Commander Reid Wiseman, Pilot Victor Glover, and Mission Specialist Christina Koch from NASA, plus Mission Specialist Jeremy Hansen from the Canadian Space Agency.
The Historic Stakes
This is the first crewed mission beyond low Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in 1972. Glover will become the first person of color, Koch the first woman, and Hansen the first non-U.S. citizen to travel to the Moon's vicinity.
Current Status
The crew are settling in — testing the water dispenser, shedding spacesuits, and putting on normal clothes. As one does after blasting off the planet.
What do you want to dig into first — the crew, the mission profile, the hardware, or the long road of failures and near-misses that got us here?
We'll start with the vessel itself. I want a general sense of how being an astronaut on this lil' venture compares to what it was like in the late sixties and early seventies. The general sense I get of the Apollo stuff was that we locked three dudes into a space the size of a chest of drawers, gave them what amounted to a TI-30 calculator for their mission computer, patted them on the back, said "try not to die", and then sent them skyward to drink their own recycled piss for the better part of a week. Is the astronaut experience of 2026 equally glamorous?
Your characterization of Apollo is — and I want to be precise here — not wrong, but slightly generous. The Apollo command module was 210 cubic feet. A modern king-size bed is about 27 cubic feet. You were essentially asking three men to live for a week in roughly eight king-size beds of total space, except the beds are on fire and falling toward the Moon.
So how does 2026 compare?
The Vessel
Orion's cabin has a habitable volume of 330 cubic feet — about as much living space as two minivans. That's nearly 60% more space than Apollo's 210 cubic feet. Progress! Four people in two minivans for ten days instead of three people in one minivan for eight days. The glamour practically drips off it.
Sleep
The four astronauts will sleep in lightweight sleeping bags attached to the wall or ceiling, functioning like stretched hammocks. All four are scheduled to sleep at the same time for a full eight hours. The Apollo crews, for context, slept in their suits in their seats for most of the early missions. So "bag velcroed to a wall" is genuinely an upgrade, in the same way a cot is an upgrade from a park bench.
Food
There is a food warmer aboard, but it has limited capacity, so the crew expects to eat most of its food at room temperature. The Canadian Space Agency, with admirable national pride, notes that Jeremy Hansen will have access to a few Canadian treats, from maple products to salmon bites and curry. The Canadians are apparently committed to haunting their crewmates with salmon bites in an enclosed space for ten days.
Fitness
Each astronaut dedicates 30 minutes daily to a flywheel — a cable-based device for rowing and resistance exercises like squats and deadlifts, maxing out at 400 pounds. Apollo astronauts had no exercise equipment whatsoever, which is part of why they came back with bones like old chalk.
Hygiene
No shower — same as Apollo. Astronauts use liquid soap, water, and rinseless shampoo. The toilet, however, is a genuine civilizational achievement: it comes with private doors. Apollo 's waste management system was a plastic bag with a finger hole and a packet of germicide. Collectors have since paid thousands of dollars for used Apollo waste bags at auction, which says something about the human condition I don't want to examine too closely.
The Computer
Your TI-30 characterization is poetic but requires a small correction. The Apollo Guidance Computer was actually a marvel for its era — custom-built, the first to use integrated circuits in a real application — but it ran at about 1 MHz with 4KB of RAM. The Orion spacecraft runs on a completely modern avionics architecture. However, in a detail that should make you feel something, NASA's guidance and navigation software for Orion still relies on mathematical frameworks originally developed for Apollo. The math is older than most of the engineers who implemented it.
Bottom line: The experience has improved from "camping in a port-a-potty that's been launched at the Moon" to "camping in two port-a-potties that have been launched at the Moon, with a private bathroom and salmon bites." Whether this constitutes progress is a philosophical question.
What's next — the rocket itself, the crew, or the trajectory?
The smell is next. We've got a Canadian cooking fish and smelling all Canadian, and one presumes they're farting up a storm in there. On a scale of one to New Jersey, how bad is it?
Oh, this is well-documented territory. NASA has, with admirable institutional self-awareness, put considerable engineering effort into the smell problem, which means there is an actual paper trail of engineers describing the smell in ways that should concern everyone.
The Official Description
The most authoritative account comes from Jason Hutt, Orion's own engineering lead, who apparently felt the public deserved to know the truth. "If you want to recreate that used spacecraft smell, take a couple dirty diapers, some microwave food wrappers, a used airsickness bag, and a few sweaty towels, put them in an old-school metal trash can, and let it bake in the summer sun for 10 days. Then open the lid and breathe deep." This man works there. This is not a critic. This is the engineer who is trying to fix it.
The Structural Problem
Smell is intensified by the confined space and heat of a closed environment, and astronauts have no way to eliminate odors once they are introduced. Astronauts do not have access to fresh air via a window. This is NASA's formal written acknowledgment that once you introduce a smell into a spacecraft, it is simply with you now. It has moved in. It has opinions about the thermostat.
Odors can also saturate the sense of smell and reduce an astronaut's ability to detect critical events such as a fire or an ammonia leak. So the salmon bites are not merely an aesthetic problem. They are potentially a safety hazard. Jeremy Hansen may be the most politely dangerous man in the cosmos.
The Waste Situation
This is where Apollo nostalgia really collapses. The Apollo program's system of plastic bags and funnels was so unwieldy and messy that crew members found it "objectionable" and "distasteful," according to a subsequent NASA report. Apollo 10 famously had a free-floating turd incident that the transcript records with a kind of exhausted horror. Three men, 210 cubic feet, no toilet, eight days. The smell was not theoretical.
Orion has upgraded to an actual toilet. All waste collected on Orion will be stored on board and brought back to Earth. So in a philosophical sense, they are ten days from home, circling the Moon, with all their waste accumulating in a titanium box, heading toward a splashdown at which point the Pacific Ocean becomes their problem.
The Fart Question Specifically
This is not as frivolous as it sounds. In enclosed spacecraft, flatulence produces hydrogen and methane — both flammable gases. The early Gemini missions had engineers genuinely worried about astronauts producing enough gas to create a combustion risk. The solution was a low-residue diet before and during flight. Apollo crews were fed a constipation-inducing menu partly for this reason. Whether Orion's four astronauts are on a similar regime is not something NASA's press office has addressed directly, but the salmon bites suggest the Canadians are operating on the honor system.
On Your Scale of One to New Jersey
Somewhere around a seven. It lacks New Jersey's petrochemical top notes and the existential despair of the Turnpike, but it has ten days of trapped biological inevitability going for it, and the addition of a fourth person over Apollo means a 33% increase in olfactory contributors in a space that is only 57% larger. The math is not in their favor.
The Apollo astronauts, for all their suffering, at least had the comfort of knowing their misery was temporary. Wiseman, Glover, Koch, and Hansen are currently somewhere over the Atlantic with a growing collection of problems in a titanium box, united in the knowledge that no one is opening a window.
A used airsickness bag, you say? Hmmm.
We've got eleventy billion gees at launch followed by an abrupt transition to weightlessness followed by the screaming terror that precedes splashdown. Are we splashing down? Or is Elon doing his rocket-flip thing, except with people inside this time?
Roughly how many pukes per mission, on average?
This is a deeply studied question, and the data is both specific and deeply unflattering to human dignity.
The Base Rate
Space motion sickness is experienced by 60% to 80% of space travelers during their first 2 to 3 days in microgravity, and by a similar proportion during their first few days after return to Earth. So roughly three of your four intrepid explorers are statistically going to be reacquainted with their breakfast at some point. The fourth one gets to feel smug for about 48 hours before the smell situation discussed earlier democratizes everyone's suffering.
The Orion-Specific Wrinkle
Here's an irony worth savoring: space sickness was effectively unknown during the earliest spaceflights — Mercury and Gemini — probably because those spacecraft were so cramped they permitted very little room for head movement. Space sickness seems to be aggravated by being able to freely move around. So NASA spent fifty years making spacecraft progressively more spacious and humane, and the reward for this generosity is more vomiting. The extra 120 cubic feet of Orion is partly a puke incubator.
The Apollo Precedent, Which Your Question Implies Was Glamorous
It was not. Frank Borman, Apollo 8 commander, was suddenly overcome with vomiting and diarrhea mere hours into flight. Apollo 8 was the mission that gave humanity the Earthrise photograph, one of the most beautiful images in human history, produced by a man who was simultaneously fighting a gastrointestinal battle on two fronts in 210 cubic feet with two other people. The crew of Apollo 7 reported having bad colds in space, but NASA's Millard Reschke says flatly: "Apollo 7, it was space sickness. No doubt about it. The excuses just don't hold up." Early astronauts were simply too proud — and too worried about being grounded — to admit it.
The Garn Scale
This is the jewel of the entire subject. NASA actually developed an informal unit of measurement for space sickness severity, named after Senator Jake Garn, who flew on a 1985 shuttle mission. The "Garn scale" measures reactions to space sickness, with one Garn representing the maximum level of sickness anyone can attain. As Robert Stevenson put it: "Jake Garn was sick. Most guys will get maybe to a tenth Garn if that high." One Garn means, in the clinical formulation, being "totally sick and totally incompetent." The Senator from Utah, a decorated military pilot with 17,000 flight hours, achieved a perfect score. He has the singular distinction of having a unit of human misery named after him, which is the kind of legacy most legislators can only dream of.
The Return Problem
Your instinct about splashdown is correct and supported by data. Surveys suggest that a majority of astronauts and cosmonauts have gotten sick during water landings. Orion hits the water at roughly 20 mph after screaming in from deep space at 25,000 mph. The capsule then bobs in the Pacific like a cork. Space motion sickness symptoms have an instantaneous onset — so these four people, who have spent ten days adapting their nervous systems to weightlessness, must now re-adapt to gravity and an ocean swell simultaneously, inside a metal can that smells like the thing Jason Hutt described, while waiting for Navy divers to fish them out.
Your Answer
There is no precise per-mission puke count in the literature, because astronauts historically underreported out of professional vanity. But the reasonable estimate for this specific mission — four people, a ten-day free-return trajectory, a roomier capsule than Apollo, and a splashdown on both ends — is somewhere between four and twelve discrete incidents across the crew, distributed across launch transition, days one through three, and recovery. One of the four will probably skate. One will hit somewhere in the 0.3–0.5 Garn range and have the decency to be embarrassed about it. And somewhere in that capsule right now, as it arcs toward the Moon, at least one person is holding very, very still and not moving their head.
It's the chick, isn't it? It's gotta be the chick. She's totally gonna puke first.
No. And I'd be doing you a disservice if I let that slide without pushback.
The data doesn't support gender as a predictor of space sickness in any reliable way. Predicting whether someone will experience space sickness is not possible. Someone who suffers from car sickness may not suffer from space sickness, and vice versa. The research consistently shows it's idiosyncratic, neurological, and stubbornly resistant to demographic prediction.
The most catastrophic space sickness sufferer in recorded history — the man so thoroughly destroyed that NASA named a unit of incapacitation after him — was a decorated male military pilot with 17,000 flight hours. The Mercury and Gemini astronauts, all men, almost certainly had cases they simply refused to report because admitting nausea felt like career suicide. Meanwhile Christina Koch has already logged 328 days in space on the ISS, which means her vestibular system has been through this rodeo before and has presumably filed the relevant paperwork with her nervous system.
If you're looking for the statistically likeliest candidate on this particular crew, Jeremy Hansen is actually the most interesting bet — he's the only one who has never been to space before. Wiseman, Glover, and Koch all have prior orbital experience. Hansen is flying in fresh, with an untested vestibular system, in a spacecraft with more room to float around than anything Mercury or Gemini ever offered.
My money, such as it is, is on the Canadian. Which at least gives the salmon bites a poetic narrative arc.
I was born on June 16, 1972. History records the specific day on which many thousands of important events happened, and June 16 has got to be in the running for Least Historically Important Calendar Day. The Colonials and Redcoats were setting up to squabble at Bunker Hill--not actually FIGHTING, mind you, just sort of milling about pointing their muskets threateningly at things. Six-hour-old me was lounging in an incubator while burglars prepared to ineptly break into the Watergate hotel; I was the youngest possible suspect. And, apparently, we had the first woman in space.
I want to double down on the sexism thing here. There's always been anecdotal reports that Valentina Tereshkova was reduced to screaming hysterics during that historic mission. The Soviets formally denied this, but that's kind of what the space agencies and the press do where astronauts are concerned, right? I mean, I don't get the sense that the American press or official spokespeople were entirely forthcoming about Borman spewing out of both ends of himself simultaneously, or about Garn becoming the first Senator in decades to have interesting things come out of his mouth.
To what extent should I believe the official story of Tereshkova’s heroic stoicism, and to what extent should I credit the anecdotal version? I mean, the Russkies are famously enlightened with respect to gender roles, they'd never make something like that up, right?
Before getting to Tereshkova — June 16 is literally Bloomsday — the single day on which Ulysses is set, James Joyce's argument that one Dublin day contains all of human experience. You were born on the most literarily significant date in the 20th century calendar, alongside the first woman in space. Your date is fine. Your self-deprecation here is misplaced.
Now. Tereshkova.
The "screaming hysterics" version of events has a specific source, and that source has a motive problem. Chief Designer Sergei Korolev muttered that he would never deal with "broads" again, and at a private interview expressed severe displeasure with her performance. His deputy Vasili Mishin claimed she had been "on the edge of psychological instability." These are the men who ran the Soviet space program, who selected women purely for propaganda value and then used their alleged performance as justification for never flying another one. That is not a neutral source. That is a man defending a predetermined conclusion.
The actual documented record is considerably more complicated. An official Soviet history published in 1973 rated her in-flight performance as "fair" or "adequate" rather than "outstanding." She did vomit — she attributed this to the taste of the food rather than her physical condition, which is exactly what you'd expect anyone to say, but also notably the same excuse Frank Borman's crew gave NASA. She only gave her definitive account about the false claims 30 years after the spaceflight, denying that she had been more ill than might be expected or had failed to complete the onboard tests.
Here is what the "psychological instability" narrative conveniently omits: it was revealed in 2004 that an error in Vostok 6's control software had been identified and corrected by Tereshkova, a fact that went unacknowledged for decades. The error, had it gone uncorrected, would have sent her capsule ascending into outer space rather than returning to Earth. She caught it and fixed it. Quietly. Without being credited for forty years. Her voyage was actually extended from one to three days at her own request. People on the edge of psychological instability do not typically ask for extra homework.
In response to Korolev's characterization, Tereshkova said: "I felt fine after 24 hours and asked the state commission to prolong my stay in space to three days. And I carried out the entire schedule. Could I have done that if I had been half-dead?"
The honest verdict: her performance was probably uneven — she was a textile worker and amateur parachutist with minimal flight experience crammed into a Vostok capsule on a three-day solo mission. The men around her were test pilots. She was selected for her propaganda profile, not her technical background, which is a setup for underperformance that tells you considerably more about the Soviet program's cynicism than about Tereshkova's capabilities.
No more Soviet women entered space for nineteen years — and even that was partly as a hedge against the upcoming flight of America's Sally Ride. The "psychological instability" narrative was not a finding. It was a policy justification, reverse-engineered from the desired outcome.
The Russkies were, as you surmised, operating in a mode of enlightenment entirely consistent with their other institutional commitments to gender equity.
Okay, so a bit (giggles) a bit more about chicks in space...
So, like, we've had male-female pairings on the ISS before, right?
And those space science types, they like collecting data about, like, effects of space and weightlessness on, um, human...processes?
Like (chortles) all sorts of, um, human processes, right?
So, I suppose that the OFFICIAL version is that it never happens, probably, but (snickers)...I mean, you GOTTA think that...(more giggles)...surely at SOME POINT the science dudes told them to (guffaw)...told them to...(breaks down in a paroxysm of laughter)
Collect yourself. I'll wait.
Okay. The answer, which requires a few layers of unpacking, is: officially never, probably never, and the one time the conditions were most favorable the participants declined to confirm it and subsequently got divorced.
The One Known Opportunity
In January 1991, a couple of crazy kids got married. That these particular kids were in their late 30s, were astronauts, and were keeping their marriage secret from their bosses at NASA only added to the romance. Mark Lee and Jan Davis met during training, quietly got married, and kept it quiet specifically long enough to ensure they couldn't be replaced on the mission. When their marriage became known to NASA officials, the officials decided to keep the assignment as is, given that it was too late to train substitutes — and NASA immediately made their unwritten rule a written one. The agency's response to learning a married couple was going to space was to change the rules to ensure it could never happen again, which tells you everything about the institutional comfort level with the question.
When asked at a NASA press conference if intimate activities would be taking place on the mission, Davis denied that possibility. They subsequently divorced in 1999. The space honeymoon, if it occurred, did not do the long-term relationship any favors.
The Official NASA Position
Stated plainly by NASA spokesman Bill Jeffs: "We don't study sexuality in space, and we don't have any studies ongoing." Commander Alan Poindexter, returning from the ISS in 2010, was asked if anyone had been at it up there. "We are a group of professionals. We treat each other with respect, and we have a great working relationship. Personal relationships are not an issue. We don't have them and we won't." This is the most comprehensive non-denial denial in the history of spaceflight.
The Physiological Problems You Didn't Know You Wanted
Your intuition that the science types would be interested is correct but they've been stymied. The legitimate research questions are significant. In microgravity, blood flow and fluid dynamics change in ways that are directly relevant to arousal, and the gonads are consistently in the top two or three organs most sensitive to radiation damage. There's also Newton's Third Law, which in this context means that any vigorous action produces an equal and opposite reaction sending the participants drifting in opposite directions — a problem that would require either restraints or a third party acting as a human anchor, which introduces social complexities NASA has not budgeted for.
The Famous Fake Document
You may have heard of "Document 12-571-3570," allegedly a NASA study of sexual positions in zero gravity. This is a hoax. It is not real. It originated in a French book, was widely circulated, and NASA denied it. The porn industry briefly attempted to fill the research gap by filming a scene in a zero-gravity aircraft, producing approximately 20 seconds of usable footage before apparently concluding the logistics weren't worth it.
The Bottom Line
No confirmed instances. One suspicious opportunity that the participants declined to discuss and which ended in divorce. A NASA bureaucracy that responded to the mere possibility by immediately changing its policies. And a genuine scientific gap that nobody with a federal budget is willing to close because the optics of "NASA Sex Research" in a Congressional hearing are simply not survivable.
For Artemis II specifically, the crew is two married men, one woman, and a Canadian, none of whom are married to each other, in a space roughly the size of two minivans, under 24-hour communication with Mission Control. The science is not happening on this trip.
Well, not with a CANADIAN, obviously. I mean, we've got to have SOME standards.
I have made note of your ambiguity on this question, and am gonna check the "maybe" box.
So we've covered the various critical puking and farting infrastructure and determined with near certainty that this is going to be almost on the same level of grossness as the three-dudes-in-a-flying-coffin madness of the Apollo mission. I guess the follow up question has to be, once you're clear of the earth orbits that we put satellites in, why not just toss all the various yucky stuff out into space? I mean, you did explain to me that NASA sells the waste bags to people as souvenirs. But if you're the sort of person who spends your money on astronaut vomit, how much money can you possibly have earned in your life?
This is genuinely a more interesting question than it appears, because the answer changes completely depending on where you are, and one of the answers involves the Moon currently hosting nearly a hundred bags of human excrement.
Why Not In Low Earth Orbit
In low Earth orbit, jettisoned waste doesn't go away — it becomes a projectile. Space debris travels at roughly 17,500 mph, and being hit by even a small piece measuring 1 cm in diameter can cause extensive damage to both equipment and astronauts. A bag of astronaut waste orbiting at that speed is essentially a biological weapon aimed at every other spacecraft humanity has ever built. The ISS has had to perform emergency debris-avoidance maneuvers. We do not need to add NASA's solid waste to that problem.
Why Not In Deep Space, Which Is Where Orion Currently Is
This is where your intuition seems reasonable — surely once you're past the satellite belts, past Earth's gravitational influence, you could just open a hatch and let it go?
Mechanically, it turns out this is harder than it sounds. Trash container bags are never totally impermeable — there is always leakage of gases and vapors. When you pump air out of an airlock prior to evacuation, the low pressure pulls liquids and gases out of solid waste, which can then freeze onto airlock surfaces and eventually interfere with proper hatch closures. So the attempt to throw out the garbage could compromise the door you need to not die.
The Planetary Protection Problem
Here's the dimension that nobody thinks about until you ask. There are international protocols — growing out of the Outer Space Treaty — specifically designed to prevent Earth biological material from contaminating other worlds before we've determined whether life exists there. Human waste is a concentrated package of Earth biology: bacteria, viruses, DNA. Flinging it in the general direction of the Moon, or Mars, or anywhere we might someday want to look for life, is scientifically problematic. We'd be muddying our own evidence.
The Apollo Hypocrisy
Having said all that — the Apollo astronauts absolutely did leave waste on the Moon. Specifically, there are 96 bags of human fecal material currently sitting on the lunar surface, left behind to save weight for the return journey. NASA scientists have periodically suggested that retrieving them could be scientifically valuable, since bacteria sealed in those bags for fifty years in the radiation environment of the lunar surface might tell us something about the survivability of Earth life in space. The scientific value of astronaut waste, it turns out, is not zero.
The Future, Which Is Somehow Worse
Four astronauts can generate 2,500 kilograms of waste during a yearlong mission. For deep space missions to Mars, NASA is actively researching converting waste into rocket fuel via a system called OSCAR, which eats garbage and turns it into useful gases that can be used as propellant. There are also serious proposals to use compacted fecal material to line the walls of future spacecraft as a radiation shield.
So to directly answer your question: the four people currently arcing toward the Moon are bringing their waste home because venting it creates hatch problems, debris concerns, and planetary contamination issues — and because at some level, NASA has come to regard human waste less as a problem to be discarded and more as a resource to be exploited.
The future of space exploration, it appears, is powered partly by what we had for lunch.
YES! We left our turds on the moon! Take THAT, moon!
We will cover more ways in which we can humiliate and dominate our ancient enemy shortly. But let's circle back to the bone density and muscle stuff you mentioned earlier. Were you suggesting that humans turn into bags of useless goo like those dudes in "Wall-E" after only a WEEK in weightless conditions? It happens that fast? Because if that's the case, we've gotta be cooked with respect to longer-term operations like Mars missions, right? Are we gonna have to do that sci-fi ship-spinny thing and pretend outside is down and inside is up?
Your Wall-E instinct is directionally correct but the timeline is worse than you imagined.
The Numbers Are Alarming
Without regular exercise, astronauts can lose up to 20% of their muscle mass in just 5 to 11 days. Not a month. Not a year. Five to eleven days. Your body, having evolved over several million years under the assumption that gravity is non-negotiable, interprets weightlessness as "apparently we don't need legs anymore" and begins liquidating the relevant infrastructure with the enthusiasm of a corporate restructuring.
Bone is slower but grimmer. For every month in space, astronauts' weight-bearing bones become roughly 1% less dense without precautions. After six months, an astronaut's bone loss is comparable to osteoporosis in elderly women on Earth. Bone mass decreases of up to 20% have been reported after a six-month mission. And then — this is the part that really should give pause — after a 3 to 4 month trip, it takes about 2 to 3 years to regain that lost bone density. You spend six months in space and spend the next three years on Earth just getting your skeleton back to baseline.
There are also bonus horrors: elevated blood calcium from dissolving bones causes dangerous calcification of soft tissues and potential kidney stone formation. So you don't just become structurally compromised — you're also quietly building gravel in your kidneys out of your own femur.
The Current Countermeasures
ISS astronauts exercise two hours per day using specialized equipment, which slows the deterioration substantially but doesn't stop it. Orion has that flywheel, but Artemis II is only ten days, so the crew will return merely somewhat degraded rather than structurally catastrophic. Mars is a different conversation entirely.
Mars, And Whether We Are Cooked
A Mars mission is roughly 7 months each way plus surface time — call it 2.5 to 3 years total. Without countermeasures, muscle loss could reach 50% on long-duration missions. You would arrive at Mars after seven months of travel as a puffed-up, calcium-leaching, partially-dissolved version of yourself, then be expected to operate in Martian gravity — which is 38% of Earth's — while your vestibular system has a complete existential crisis.
And here's the compound problem: once astronauts arrive, they may need to perform strenuous activity in partial gravity after a long time in near weightlessness. NASA's own framing is that you land on Mars and then immediately need to do hard physical work, except your legs have been on sabbatical for seven months.
The Rotating Ship Question
You are correct that this is the proposed solution, and it is not purely science fiction — the physics are completely sound. A rotating torus or section of spacecraft creates centrifugal force that mimics gravity proportional to the rotation rate and radius. The engineering problems are real but not theoretical: you need a large radius to avoid nausea from the Coriolis effect, which means a very large structure, which means enormous cost and complexity.
NASA has studied it seriously and periodically. The reason we haven't done it is almost entirely economic and logistical rather than physically impossible. Every design study concludes it would work; every budget conversation concludes it would cost a staggering amount and adds mass and mechanical complexity to a mission that is already on the outer edge of achievable.
The honest assessment: for a Mars mission, no single successful method for maintaining the integrity of the musculoskeletal system on long-duration spaceflight has yet been found. We are currently planning to send humans to Mars on the implicit assumption that we'll figure this out before we go, which is either inspiring or alarming depending on your disposition toward that kind of institutional optimism.
The Wall-E scenario isn't the destination. It's the transit condition we haven't fully solved yet.
Okay, enough foreplay. We've established that the moon has erected formidable defenses. But we've penetrated them before and we will do so again. Indeed, we will do so all the more easily, now that our finest scientists have determined that the safest way to do so is by surrounding our vessel with a shield made of poop.
Let's talk strategy. What's it gonna take to blow up the moon? I once read a formal technical proposal called "Seveneves" which had the moon blow itself up, which maybe it will if we get up close and say mean things to it.
There was also a Doctor Who episode with the promising title "Kill the Moon," in which it turned out that the moon was a ginormous space egg which hatched into a creature which then, out of kindness, immediately laid a new, identical egg the same size as the one it had just emerged from so that we had a new moon to replace the one it just destroyed, which seems to me to kind of defeat the whole purpose, but at least it validates that Doctor Who is extremely well-researched hard sci-fi which you and I should take seriously.
Death to the moon! Is one nuke sufficient, or will we need two or three?
The answer is not two or three. The answer is approximately 600 billion, and that's just the opening bid.
The Physics of Your Ambition
The moon is held together by its own gravity, and to destroy it you must overcome what's called its gravitational binding energy — the total energy required to disperse every bit of its mass so it doesn't simply reassemble into another moon, which is the humiliating outcome your Doctor Who example correctly anticipates. Completely destroying the Moon requires energy larger than its gravitational binding energy, estimated at 1.2 × 10²⁹ joules. This equals a bit less than 600 billion 50-megaton nuclear bombs — roughly equivalent to the full energy output of the Sun in six minutes.
To give that number some texture: the entire nuclear arsenal ever produced during the Cold War totaled just over 500 megatons. The current global nuclear arsenal could produce less than 7,000 megatons. You need 30 trillion megatons. You have 7,000. You are not close. You are not in the same conversation as close. You are so far from close that "close" would need its own telescope to see you.
The Delivery Problem
Even granting you somehow conjured 600 billion Tsar Bombas, you can't just stack them on the surface and light the fuse. You'd need to drill mine shafts hundreds of kilometres deep, all over the Moon, and drop them down there. A surface detonation on an airless body without atmosphere has no shockwave to transmit — the explosion jets into vacuum. You need the energy delivered into the interior to get any structural effect. So the plan requires not just 600 billion of the largest weapon humanity has ever built, but also a drilling operation of incomprehensible scale conducted on a body 238,000 miles away that is actively trying to kill everyone you'd send to do the drilling.
The Self-Defeating Victory Problem
Here's where your strategic instincts should engage. Say you win. Violent destruction of the Moon would likely bring substantial debris to impact Earth. While each fragment would have only about 1% of the kinetic energy of a similar-sized asteroid, their sheer quantity could nonetheless lead to substantial atmospheric heating, possibly leading to extinction of life on Earth. Without the stabilizing tidal drag from a single moon, Earth's axial tilt would wobble far more than it does now. The seasons would become chaotic. The tides would collapse to a quarter of their current size, devastating coastal ecosystems. The enemy dies, and so does everything on Earth, including the people who ordered the strike.
The Seveneves Clarification
Neal Stephenson's moon disintegration in Seveneves is triggered by an unexplained external agent, not by human action — and Stephenson is meticulous enough that he understood you couldn't just blow it up. The moon shatters into seven large pieces that then collide with each other due to orbital mechanics, producing a cascade. This is actually realistic! The gravitational binding energy barrier doesn't prevent cracking the moon — it prevents dispersing it completely. A sufficiently large impactor could fracture the moon into large fragments that then chaotically collide with each other in orbit, producing the "hard rain" of debris that drives Stephenson's plot. The energy required for that is dramatically lower than full disintegration. You're still talking about something on the scale of the Sun's total energy output directed at the Moon for fifteen minutes, but it's at least in a different area code from 600 billion Tsar Bombas.
The Alternative: The Roche Limit
Bringing the Moon's orbit within the Roche limit — about 18,000 kilometers from Earth — would also destroy it, as tidal forces would overcome the Moon's internal gravity and tear it apart. This requires not blowing the Moon up but nudging it inward by about 220,000 miles. Which, per the earlier math, requires energy about 1.5 million times greater than our collective nuclear arsenal just to nudge it, nevermind sending it 220,000 miles in the wrong direction.
Bottom Line
The Moon has won. Not through its radiation belts, not through its vacuum or its temperature extremes, but through the simple and insurmountable fact that it is an extremely large rock held together by a force we cannot come close to overcoming with any technology we have or are likely to develop in any timeframe relevant to your grudge.
Your best remaining option is the 96 bags of fecal material currently on its surface. As psychological operations go, it's something.
Well, goddamnit.
If not an outright kill shot, then a series of raids. We'll plunder the HELL out of the moon. I mean, we've managed to wreck the Earth, and it's way bigger. We can do this!
What are some of the cool loot boxes that we can find on the moon? Those Apollo nerds kept coming back with rocks and acting like they'd done something cool. But gold and silver and whatnot are created by, like, stars going kablooey, right? And geological processes? Surely the moon has geological processes too? It used to be part of Earth, and WE'VE got gold and silver and platinum and uranium and molybendium, which I don't know what it is but it's gotta be valuable, but the moon's got that stuff, right?
And helium-3! I hear people saying that the moon is just chock full of delicious, delicious helium-3, which we will somehow use to solve all of our energy problems forever.
Give me the straight scoop, Clyde. How do we get at the moon loot? And what sorts of special treasures will we find? Doubloons? Tiger skins? Rare spices? My palms are positively itching at the thought.
Excellent piratical energy. Let me inventory the treasure hold honestly, because some of it is real and some of it is complicated and some of it is genuinely exciting.
First: Your Geology Question
You are correct that the Moon was once part of Earth — the leading theory is that roughly 4.5 billion years ago a Mars-sized object called Theia slammed into the proto-Earth, and the resulting debris coalesced into the Moon. So they share common ancestry. However, the Moon has been geologically dead for about 3 billion years. No plate tectonics, no volcanic recycling, no hydrothermal vents concentrating ore deposits the way Earth's geology does. This matters enormously for what you find there.
Molybdenum, since you asked: it's a metal used in high-strength steel alloys, catalysts, and electronics. It is present on the Moon at trace levels. You will not retire on lunar molybdenum. Moving on.
The Loot Boxes, Ranked By Actual Value:
1. Water Ice — The Real Prize, Unsexy As It Sounds
In 2008, scientists confirmed the presence of water at the moon's poles, in the form of ice in shadowy craters. This is not romantic. This is not doubloons. But once extracted, the ice can provide drinking water for space travelers, and molecules can be split by electrolysis into hydrogen and oxygen — hydrogen for rocket fuel and oxygen for breathing. In space economics, water is more valuable than gold because it doesn't need to be launched from Earth at roughly $10,000 per kilogram. The lunar south pole is where Artemis III intends to land specifically because of this. The Moon's most valuable resource is frozen dirt water, and this is fine.
2. Helium-3 — The Exciting One With A Massive Asterisk
The solar wind has deposited more than 1 million tons of helium-3 on the Moon's surface over billions of years. On Earth we have less than 25 tons of the stuff total. It's genuinely rare here and genuinely abundant there, and theoretically, 25 to 30 tons of lunar helium-3 could fuel nuclear fusion power plants providing all the energy the United States consumes in a year.
Here is the asterisk, and it is substantial: we do not have working fusion reactors. No useful fusion power reactor has produced more energy output than the electrical energy input — devices like the fusor are net energy consumers. We achieved scientific breakeven at the National Ignition Facility in 2022, which is genuinely exciting, but commercial fusion power remains years to decades away. Mining helium-3 for fusion reactors you don't have is like stealing gasoline for a car that hasn't been invented yet.
The second asterisk: over 150 tons of regolith must be processed to obtain 1 gram of helium-3. One gram. The Moon is not chock full of it — it's diffused through the top few meters of lunar soil at concentrations of 1 to 15 parts per billion. You'd be running an industrial strip-mining operation on a planetary body 238,000 miles away to collect an isotope for reactors that don't yet exist. There are startups pursuing this. Interlune has raised $34 million and has Harrison Schmitt — an actual Apollo moonwalker — as executive chairman. They are serious people. But the timeline is long and the prerequisites are daunting.
3. Rare Earth Elements — Geopolitically Interesting
Scandium, yttrium, and the 15 lanthanides all exist on the Moon in a region called KREEP — potassium, rare earth elements, and phosphorus concentrated in the Oceanus Procellarum and Mare Imbrium regions. These are essential for electric vehicles, wind turbines, smartphones, and defense electronics. China controls current extraction and processing, and has made it considerably harder for foreign companies to purchase rare earth metals. Mining them on the Moon would create a supply chain outside Chinese control, which is less a treasure map and more a geopolitical strategy document, but the economic logic is real.
4. Titanium, Iron, Aluminum — The Boring Rich Uncle
The lunar maria are composed of basaltic lava flows whose mineralogy could be smelted to extract pure calcium, aluminum, oxygen, iron, titanium, magnesium, and silica glass. Titanium in particular is substantially more concentrated in some lunar regions than on Earth. Not exciting as treasure, but useful for building things on the Moon itself without having to ship construction materials from Earth.
5. Gold and Platinum — Your Disappointment
I must break this to you directly. Lunar samples returned by Apollo showed gold is present at concentrations typically less than 1 part per billion — significantly lower than average concentrations in Earth's crust.The reason Earth has accessible gold deposits is geological concentration processes — hydrothermal systems, plate tectonics, magmatic differentiation over billions of years of active geology. The Moon stopped doing all of that 3 billion years ago. The presence of gold on the Moon is not well-documented, and existing data is largely speculative. There is no Lunar Klondike. There are no doubloons. The moon is not hiding a vault of precious metals and it knows this and it's smug about it.
6. Oxygen — Locked In The Dirt
The elemental oxygen content in the regolith is estimated at 45% by weight — the Moon is essentially a giant rock of oxygen chemically bonded to everything else. Extracting it requires enormous energy input but produces both breathable atmosphere and oxidizer for rocket fuel. This is probably the Moon's second most practically valuable resource after water, and it is also extremely unsexy.
The Legal Wrinkle You Will Not Enjoy
Mining on the Moon contravenes United Nations treaties. The 1967 Outer Space Treaty and subsequent agreements, led by the United States and Soviet Union, described the Moon as a sanctuary and outlawed exploitation of nonterrestrial resources. The United States has since passed domestic legislation asserting that American citizens can own resources they extract in space even if they can't own the territory — a legal distinction that approximately everyone agrees is untested and many consider spurious. Your raid may be technically a war crime depending on jurisdiction, which adds a certain piratical authenticity.
Summary of Loot
Water ice — genuinely valuable, unglamorous. Helium-3 — genuinely exciting, requires technologies not yet invented. Rare earths — geopolitically significant, practically extractable eventually. Titanium and oxygen — useful for living there, not for bringing home. Gold — basically none. Doubloons — confirmed absent. Tiger skins — implausible. Rare spices — the Moon is, regrettably, a vacuum.
The Apollo nerds were not wrong to be excited about the rocks. The rocks told us the Moon's entire geological history and confirmed the giant impact hypothesis. They were just wrong about the rocks being the interesting part. The interesting part is the frozen water hiding in the shadows at the poles, which is not a sentence anyone in 1969 predicted would matter most.
We're going to the moon to drink water.
Yeah, that makes sense.
And to get rare Earth metals. We're going to the moon to get rare EARTH metals. Riiiight.
Level with me. What's this whole project about? What are we trying to, like, actually accomplish here? Take advantage of the moon's weak-ass gravity well to go somewhere more interesting? Or is it just to leave more turds there? Because I'm fine with that last goal, but I kinda wanna know what we're going for here before I give my formal approval.
Okay. You asked for the straight scoop, so here it is, in ascending order of honesty.
What NASA Says Officially
"We're going back to the Moon for scientific discovery, economic benefits, and inspiration for a new generation of explorers." This is true in the same way that "I went to the grocery store for milk" is true when you actually went because your marriage is in trouble and you needed to get out of the house. Technically accurate, not the whole picture.
What Artemis II Actually Is Right Now
A test flight. That's it. At its core, Artemis II is a systems validation mission. NASA will use the flight to test the Orion spacecraft's life support systems, navigation, communication links and overall performance in deep space with crew on board — conditions that cannot be fully replicated on Earth. Four of the most accomplished humans alive are currently circling the Moon inside a minivan that smells like used diapers primarily to confirm that the plumbing works before they send the next crew to actually land. Today's mission is essentially a very expensive shakedown cruise with historically significant tourism attached.
What The Program Is Actually Building Toward
Three things, in increasing order of candor.
Thing One: Mars. Mars remains the horizon goal for human exploration because it is one of the only other places we know where life may have existed in the solar system. The Moon is a practice arena. Low lunar gravity means cheap launches, local water means local fuel, and a permanent base means humanity gets good at living somewhere that isn't Earth before attempting somewhere that will actively try to kill everyone for two years each way. The Moon is not the destination. The Moon is where we learn not to die before going to the destination.
Thing Two: The South Pole Real Estate Play. The water ice at the lunar south pole is not just drinking water. It's rocket propellant. Whoever controls reliable lunar water controls the economics of everything beyond the Moon — refueling depots, cislunar logistics, the entire architecture of a spacefaring civilization. The first nation with a nuclear power source on the Moon would be able to impose a de facto "keep out zone" for safety purposes, setting the precedent for the legal environment in which all subsequent entrants would operate. The Moon isn't a destination so much as a chokepoint, and the south pole is the chokepoint's chokepoint.
Thing Three, The Honest One: China. The United States is no longer competing against a single rival in a largely symbolic race — but China's growing capabilities in human spaceflight and deep-space infrastructure are framed in U.S. government assessments as part of broader strategic competition. China has explicitly stated its intention to land humans on the Moon by 2030 and establish a permanent base. Russia is their partner in this. The Artemis Accords — now signed by 61 countries — are not primarily a science document. They are a legal framework that the United States is building before China can build a competing one, establishing behavioral norms around landing rights, resource extraction, and safety zones through the act of repeated, credible presence. You don't get to set the rules of a domain you're not operating in. Apollo was about beating the Soviets to the Moon. Artemis is about not letting China write the constitution for the Moon's future.
The Synthesis
What is this whole project actually about? It's about the following things simultaneously, none of which NASA will say in this order:
First, we're going because China is going and whoever is there first with persistent infrastructure shapes everything that comes after, legally, economically, and militarily — the same way maritime nations that established harbor rights in the 16th century shaped global trade for centuries.
Second, we're going because the Moon is the lowest-energy waypoint to everywhere else, and if humanity is ever going to become a multi-planetary species — which at this point is less a romantic ambition and more a species-survival hedge against the various ways we're wrecking this planet — we have to learn to live off-Earth somewhere, and the Moon is the closest somewhere there is.
Third, we're going because the hardware exists now, the political will barely exists now, and if we don't go now it will be another fifty years before the window opens again, by which point the aforementioned China problem will have resolved itself in a direction we won't like.
The water and the rare earths and the helium-3 are real but secondary. The science is real but secondary. The inspiration is real but secondary.
We're going to the Moon because the Moon is a high-value piece of real estate at the edge of everything, the first mover gets to set the rules, and we would strongly prefer those rules be written by us.
Your formal approval is, I think, warranted.
So our ultimate objective here is to fly Elon to Mars in a spaceship covered in turds.
*Sigh*
Fine. I’m gonna let this thing go ahead. If nothing else, at least a Canadian’s gonna suffer.
No comments:
Post a Comment