Aramco of The Moon: Lunar Ice Mining For Multiplanetary Rockets | Starpath

0:00If you look at the technologies that our species has developed, the trends for our tendencies to engage in conflict. one of the things that you'll pretty quickly conclude is that unlike humans of, I don't know, 500 BC, it is actually a possibility for us to cause extinction onto ourselves. And one of the great ways, among the many things that we should be doing to limit the probability of extinction, making a self-sustaining city on Mars is a good one. And it's because if you make a self-sustaining city on Mars and you make a self-sustaining city on the moon, maybe you make a self-sustaining city elsewhere in the solar system.

0:31The probability of human extinction goes from some percentage that's intolerable to effectively zero. And then if you just solve for, okay, what's required for making a self-sustaining city on Mars, it's pretty obvious that the propellant production component of that equation is missing. And reasoned that way, it actually is not all that crazy. It's something that you should definitely do. And at a development cost of less than$100 million, I think it's a phenomenally good deal for humanity.

1:02Welcome to Sorcery. I'm your host, Molly O'Shea. Today, we have Sarov Shroff, founder of Starpath. Starpath recently closed on$10.5 million in funding from 8BC, Fusion Fund, Day One Ventures, Hummingbird, and more to build mega-scale propellant production in space, aka become the Aramco of the galaxy. Not bad. This is a very fun conversation that is both technical and futuristic. I hope you enjoy. Hi, Sarav. Thanks for joining us. Hey, thanks for having me. I appreciate it. Absolutely. And I love the backdrop. It's very industrial. It's giving lunar mining. It certainly is. So I want to start off strong.

1:44Sarav, when will we be multi-planetary and what would that look like? I suppose part of the answer depends on your definition of being multi-planetary. I think on the bottom end of the definition, you could say that if one person is on the surface of Mars or on the surface of the moon, then we're a multi-planet species, in which case we already are. As in, you know, we had a person on the moon in the 60s during the Apollo program. But my definition, the one that I would sort of point to is probably the most honest and accurate is when you have a self-sustaining city on Mars. or technically a self-sustaining city on any planet in the solar system, Mars is probably just the most likely.

2:21And obviously, I'd love to give you a date. It's probably something between 10 and 40 years from today. To evaluate how long it's going to take, you sort of have to walk backwards from what the definition is of a self-sustaining city on Mars, how much tonnage you'll need, as in how much equipment you'll need on the surface of Mars to make a self-sustaining city, and then how quickly we can ramp up our ability to get large amounts of payload from the surface of Earth to the surface of Mars. And in my guess, that's probably something between 10 and 40 years, although I could be wrong, but probably not by a factor of 10.

2:50I would be excited if it was 10 years. That would be great. I certainly would be as well. Okay. So before we dive into it all, congratulations on your$10.5 million fundraising round. I appreciate it. Thank you. You've raised from some pretty large names like 8VC, Fusion Fund, Day One Ventures, Hummingbird, and more. So to start, could you share more on Starpath's mission to produce megascale propellant in space? Absolutely. The StarPath was founded fundamentally to make life multi-planetary. And if you think about what's required to make life multi-planetary, you effectively need sort of two classes of machines.

3:28The first class of machine you need is a fully and rapidly reusable rocket that's capable of refueling on orbit. And the reason why you need this type of machine is because without such a machine, you're not really ever going to have a meaningful amount of tonnage or a meaningful amount of payload to the surface of Mars. Without a meaningful amount of payload, you won't be able to make a life multi-planetary. And the second type of machine that you need is a little bit less obvious. It's a rocket propellant production factory for the surface of Mars. And the reason why I need this machine is because physics limits us from being able to produce a rocket that can travel from the surface of Earth to the surface of Mars and back without refueling on the surface.

4:06And if you can't come back, A, nobody's going to want to go because if you can't come back, it's going to be a pretty depressing one-way trip. And more importantly, arguably, or maybe not more importantly, the cost basis for traveling to Mars is substantially higher if you can't reuse the spacecraft that you used to get there. So for both those reasons, rocket propellant production at pretty large scale is required on the surface of Mars to make life multi-planetary. And StarPath was founded to fill that second need and to produce that second class of technologies. And our vision is to be effectively the large-scale commodity supplier for all commodities, but namely rocket propellant on the surface of Mars.

4:43And we're doing that today by building out the sort of modular components that make up that system. So you're building out to become the Aramco of the galaxy. I mean, I wouldn't put it in those terms, but if you want to put it in those terms, sure. I will. So to break it down into the three systems that you have, so StarPath is going to be building out power generation, mining, and refining. You might have fancier terms for these, but could you explain your development process and how you're starting? Yeah, absolutely. So at a high level, at a very basic level, what you need to do to make rocket propellant on the moon or on Mars is to dig up a lot of dirt, to process that dirt, to turn it into rocket propellant, which is complicated at a mechatronics level, but is actually not complicated at a chemistry level.

5:28And I'll explain that in just a second. And then you need to generate a lot of power to power those systems that mine and refine. So those those three sort of disciplines break down into three unique products that we build, power generation, refining, and mining, which we sort of uninspiringly call tower, which is the short form for power tower, which is a power generation device. Plant, which is the short form for processing plant, which is a device that processes dirt. And rover, which is a device that mines and hauls extremely large quantities of dirt on the surface of the moon and eventually Mars.

5:57I can go into the specifics if you'd like, but at a high level, these devices are what's required to make rock propellant on the surface of the moon and Mars. While they don't share all that much in common at a functionality level, the way that we're building them has quite a bit of commonality in terms of the componentry. So even though they look different on the outside, on the inside, they share between 10 and 80 % of the parts, depending on what you're comparing. I would love to dig into them. So what are the different use cases for each of the systems and why are you building all of them at once?

6:29Good question. I'll start with the second question since it flows a little bit better logically. The reason why we're building all of them is very simple. It's if you wanted to buy the thing that we need, it is simply not for sale. If you wanted to buy a robot that's capable of mining several hundred metric tons of raw material on the surface of the moon per day, that can survive for years, drive extremely fast, navigate autonomously. You may hit one or two of those things, but you certainly won't hit them all. And you certainly won't hit them at the cost that we're targeting for the scales that we're targeting.

7:01So the simple reason for not buying the componentry off the shelf is because it's not for sale. And where subcomponents are for sale, they're largely too expensive because they're designed for low volume applications. Whereas our business, as we'll come to learn, I'll describe it in a little bit, is designed around extreme scale. So where suppliers in the industry focus on quantities of one to 10, we're focusing on quantities of 100 to 10 ,000 in the medium to long term. The use cases are each system only serves StarPath. So all the systems we're building are only for us and the end products that they produce are what we'll use to interface with the rest of the industry.

7:36The rover's job, I'll sort of go in order rover, plant and tower. The rover's job is to drive between a processing site and a mining site on the moon, dig a huge amount of material on the order of about one ton or a little bit less than one ton at a time, add a mining site, and then haul it back to a processing site. And this is a machine that we've actually built many iterations, nine to be exact, of in-house. And we're working on version 10, which makes major strides towards being ready to fly. Rover will operate in a fleet of initially something like five to 10, in the medium term, something like 50 to 100.

8:11And in the long term, who knows how many, maybe 10 ,000 or more. And the rovers have a number of interesting capabilities, but their primary, sometimes when people come by for tours, I make the joke that the rover is actually just a fancy automated shovel. It has no more complicated purpose than taking dirt out of a pit and bringing it to us so that we can cook it and turn it into rocket propellant. The plant, I would say, is probably the most eye-catching of the bunch in terms of its functionality. The plant's job is to ingest dirt on the moon and Mars. That dirt will have a small percentage of water concentration in it.

8:48The plant then heats up the dirt to pull the water out via distillation and then electrolyzes the water and turns it into oxygen and hydrogen and then subsequently liquefies those gases, oxygen and hydrogen, which for those who are not familiar with the aerospace industry, liquid oxygen is the prime constituent of rocket propellant. So liquefied oxygen is rocket propellant for all intents and purposes. And the tower, which I think is probably the most eye-catching from a distance, is the biggest of the bunch physically And it is a massive deployable solar array that generates power for both the plant and the rover.

9:19Although the plant is the primary power consuming culprit, if you will. The tower spans about 100 plus feet tall and about 20 plus feet wide. So it really is quite massive. It's like the size of a relatively tall and skinny apartment building when it's fully deployed. And it stows into a shape that's no bigger than a medium sized dining table. And so it's quite small when it's stowed. And this is a necessary design constraint because, of course, you can't put something that's the size of an apartment building in a rocket and send it to the moon cost effectively, particularly not when you want to send 10 or 100 towers at a time.

9:54Mike Solana always talks about making the moon a state, which I love. That would be great. Like, let's just buy the moon. But what are the regulatory processes for this? So first of all, unlike Mike Solana, I have no major opinions on how we deal with it from a political or ownership standpoint. We just want to follow the rules, be good neighbors, and make as many people happy at the same time as we can. At the present moment, there aren't any major regulatory bodies that are sort of enforcing any specific rules on the moon other than the rule that you can't interfere with anybody else's equipment, which we absolutely plan on not interfering with anybody else's equipment at all.

10:33And as the industry develops, regulation may develop with it. And we plan on following every single rule that applies to us. But I think arguably more importantly, it's important just to consider like how big the moon is and how little stuff there is. Like we could develop, StarPath could develop at a rate, it could 2X its production every six months for quite a while before we get to a point where we're occupying any substantial portion of the available real estate on the moon. And even in the long run case of our business, where we're operating thousands of ships every year to the surface of the moon or Mars, we really don't need a major portion of the available natural resource, nor do we need a major portion of the available geographical would be a wrong term, but the space.

11:13At the present moment and in the foreseeable future, there isn't really all that much contention for the stuff that's available on the moon, which is space and resource. If there becomes contention and, you know, relevant parties like US governments or foreign governments or an international body decides that they want to regulate it, then of course, we're going to speak our mind and ultimately follow whatever rules are placed that apply to us. Interesting. Okay. To give a sense of the scale of energy demand that you'll need to meet to propel rockets from the moon to Mars, what are you building towards?

11:44I'll sort of set the stage here by relating power generation to large vehicle launch rate. So what I mean by that is how much power do you need to produce the requisite rocket propellant to launch, let's say, one large vehicle, like let's say a starship, every year. On the moon, that number is something like 150 kilowatts. On Mars, that number is something like half of a megawatt to about 500 kilowatts. I could explain the discrepancy between the moon and Mars. It's basically just the fact that you need more propellant on the surface of Mars. Initially, StarPath's first mission is building towards a one to two starship per year launch cadence as sort of a demonstration scale.

12:22So that's about 300 kilowatts of power production, and maybe a little bit less. Our second mission will probably be about 10 times that. So it'll go from about 300 kilowatts to maybe somewhere between two and four megawatts, probably right around. And in the long run for the surface of the moon, we expect probably the maximum launch rate to be no more than maybe a thousand or 10 ,000 ships a year. So you can sort of do the math there, basically a hundred or a thousand times bigger than that second mission. So it'll probably never get any bigger than several gigawatts, which is a pretty gargantuan amount of power production from Solar Farm.

12:54Like a gigawatt, you just Google like what a gigawatt solar farm looks like on earth. Basically, like it's almost as though there are solar panels as far as the horizon. So initially the scale will be on that sort of 300 kilowatt range for demonstration. And that's our first mission in the medium term, call it a few years out. We'll grow that scale from several hundred kilowatts to low single digit megawatts. And then in the tens to hundreds of megawatts, we're happy to scale. It just depends on demand. And the last thing I'll mention that's a little interesting is that when you go, there's a sort of threshold.

13:24that's roughly around 50 megawatts, where at 50 megawatts, it actually becomes more cost effective to go nuclear. And that's sort of taking into account some assumed regulatory burden, some assumed development burden, et cetera, et cetera. But there is a threshold where you want to go nuclear and we wholly expect to hit that threshold basically as quickly as we can, and then either spin up a nuclear reactor development program in-house or buy a nuclear reactor from one of the many new companies that are building products that fit our use case. Hey, we'll get right back to the conversation after a word from our sponsor.

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14:35Visit Archer.com. In terms of the broader market and how you fit in, so SpaceX has been killing it and they've been crushing records left and right. The latest Starship launch and landing went incredibly in the chopsticks. We love that. And space launch has decreased incredibly. So in terms of the cost that it'll take to build this out, what are you initially intending for that range to be? And how do you think that'll change over time? Phenomenal question. So there's sort of two variables here. The first is the cost of development. And that number probably hovers somewhere between the 30 and$40 million range.

15:14And what I'm referencing here is a system that can operate on the surface of the moon, generate that roughly 300 kilowatt figure and produce one to two large launch vehicles worth of propellant per year. I'll add one caveat, which is that the development cost does not scale linearly. In fact, it barely scales at all because the way that we've designed the system is to be completely modular. The device that's going to be operating the 300 kilowatt scale system is actually the same set of devices that'll be operating the three megawatt scale system, just in a bigger quantity. But to answer your question directly, the development cost for that initial, you know, for those initial two systems will probably be between 30 and$40 million.

15:53The second variable is the launch cost. And what I'll say here is sort of legal aids, but I do have to say it, which is that we can't speak to the agreements we do or don't have with any companies in the industry related to launch. Our hands are sort of tied, but obviously launch cost is not 100 % in our control. And then the only final comment I'll make with respect to launch cost is that it is in the best interest of the companies that are capable of launching us to the surface of the moon to launch our payload because the product that we're building enhances the capability and reduces the operating cost and long run unit economics of their business in a time span of two to 10 years.

16:27I see. I want to get into more technical questions. Yeah. Okay. So to break things down, let's start with how you're prototyping this out. So what is your strategy for scaling up from initial prototypes to a fleet of 50 operational mining machines. What milestones do you foresee in the scaling process? So I suppose I'll start by saying that the challenge of going from one rover to 50 is really a much smaller challenge than the challenge of going from zero rovers to one. So effectively what I'm saying here is that the development burden of developing the robot we want to ship that's capable of all the things it needs to be capable of and at the unit economic cost that we want it to be.

17:11That burden is some quantity. And then building 49 additional robots on top of that is a comparative. It's not a walk in the park, but it's a comparative walk in the park. So really we don't foresee many challenges going from, let's say mission one to mission two, mission one, having a small handful of rovers, something like five to 10 and mission two, having this bigger handful of rovers that you're talking about 50 to a hundred. The biggest challenge that we're going to face is the challenge that we're facing right now, which is designing and qualifying the design for a robot that's capable of mining and hauling lots of raw material on the surface of the moon, surviving the lunar night, being tolerant of the harsh conditions of the moon, including dust and whatnot.

17:48And then going from five to 50, for example, is just going to be a matter of clicking order 45 more times on all the parts that we bought to produce the original fleet. And in terms of the design and functionality of the power generation system. Can you explain more on the super large unfolding solar array and how will that be integrated with the mining and refining operations? So I guess just to give listeners a better picture of what the final deployed system will look like on the surface of the moon, the rovers obviously are our mobile units. So they traverse in between a processing site and a mining site.

18:22The mining site is in a crater. The processing site is on the top of a hill. And there are some interesting geographical reasons why this positioning is advantageous that we'll get into possibly a little bit later on. But the basic point I'm making here is that the power tower and the plant are stationary devices. They're actually affixed to one another. So they're mechanically part of the same assembly and they sit at the top of a hill on the surface of the moon and the rovers traverse back and forth between the top of the hill and the bottom of a crater, extracting raw materials from the bottom of said crater and bringing it out to the top of the hill.

18:55Functionally speaking, the super large unfolding solar array, which we call tower is constructed structurally, mostly out of carbon fiber. And there are a couple of reasons why carbon fiber is the right choice. The first is that it's extremely light and stiff. And then the second is that you can play a neat game with carbon fiber and sort of roll it up like a measuring tape. And this rolling up of carbon fiber, like a measuring tape is the mechanism by which we're able to unfold in the Z axis, meaning in the vertical axis. So you might be wondering like, Hey, how do you ship a 100 foot tall structure to the surface of the moon?

19:29And the answer is we don't. We ship a 500 millimeter tall roll of extremely stiff carbon fiber mast that can be unrolled to a height of 100 or possibly even 100 plus feet. Furthermore, the solar panel itself is actually also a flexible material. So the solar panel can also be rolled and the final design effectively looks like one massive spool of carbon fiber that acts as the mast and then many smaller spools of solar panels that unroll vertically sort of like banners from a pole. And we unroll them in that order. So we unfold the mast vertically about a hundred feet tall. We then unfold several banners that then unroll downwards, making what looks kind of like a wind sail, but it's definitely not a wind sail given that there's no wind on the surface of the moon.

20:10So it sounds like between all the different systems that you use, obviously going to space, you need to have lighter material. Things usually have multi-purposes because there's so many different elements. You need to have backup systems in case something fails. You can only do it once. It's very expensive. How much stuff do you need to actually bring to the moon to realize this full vision? The answer to your question depends on the final scale you want to hit, but we'll sort of step through this math together and then we can conclude what total equipment mass you'll need to get to realize the long-term vision.

20:41So we'll start off with a ratio that internally we call the star path ratio. That's just the name we came up with a long time ago. And the star path ratio describes the production rate as a function of the mass of the equipment required to produce said propellant. So if you're able to produce 100 metric tons of propellant per year with a system that weighs two tons, then your star path ratio is 50. The star path ratio we're targeting in the long run is between 100 and 150, although earlier versions of the system will be a bit below that. The amount of propellant that's required to launch, let's say one large vehicle like a starship from the surface of the moon is on the order of about 200 to 250 tons.

21:18So if your star path ratio is 100, let's just take a easy number. That means that for every two and a half tons of equipment that you have on the moon, two and a half tons of rovers and plants and towers that you have on the moon, you're able to launch about one starship a year. Our first mission is going to be something like five tons. So that's about two starships a year. Our second mission may have a better, slightly better star path ratio and maybe like something like eight times the mass. So maybe something like 40 tons, and that'll be able to service something like 20 starships a year. If you want to get from 20 starships a year to, let's say a thousand, then all you need is 2 ,500 tons of equipment on the moon.

21:56And I say all you need, as if that's a small amount, that's actually substantially bigger than the sum total of all equipment we've sent to the surface of the moon times like a hundred or times 10 or something. But of course we'll scale to that size about 2 ,500 tons as the demand scales. And if the demand doesn't scale to a thousand ships a year, that's okay. In fact, there's a a totally plausible version of the future where we send a few ships to the surface of the moon for the Artemis program, which is an incredible program that's being funded by NASA, and then focus most of our efforts as a species on sending ships to Mars, which I personally think is a much more interesting destination.

22:31But the point being, basically for every ship you want to send a year, you need about two and a half tons. We expect that rate to probably top out in the foreseeable future between 100 and 1 ,000. So you'll need something between 250 tons and 2 ,500 tons of equipment on the surface of the moon. And then for Mars, that number is going to be a little bit bigger, but not all that much. Sarev, how exactly do you plan on testing all this out? The answer depends and varies by system, but across the space industry, we have a fairly well-understood methodology of testing. If you want to test whether or not something's going to work in a vacuum, which of course you need to, you can use a vacuum chamber.

23:09If you want to, understand whether something's going to survive the lunar night. You can use a variant of a vacuum chamber called a thermal vacuum chamber or a TVAC. That's sort of like a vacuum that can simulate extreme cold and also extreme hot temperatures. If you want to simulate the acoustic loading, the mechanical acoustic loading of a device during launch on a rocket, you can use a device called a vibe table. And StarPath really is no different in these ways. We're not using anything out of the ordinary from a testing standpoint. And all of the devices that we're using to test our systems are, I don't want to say cookie cutter because they're not quite cookie cutter, but standard across the airspace industry.