Moonshot: Our Cosmic Survival Strategy

Michael: In 1969, when the Apollo 13 crew lost their main oxygen tank 200,000 miles from Earth, they had one option — swing around the Moon and come home. The entire rescue took four days. Now imagine that same emergency, but instead of four days from home, you're seven months away. That's Mars. There's no abort. There's no swinging around anything. You either survive with what you have, or you don't. Michael: And yet, right now, in early 2026, multiple space agencies and private companies are racing to send humans to Mars by the mid-2030s. NASA's Artemis program, SpaceX's Starship, the European Space Agency's contributions — all of them talk about Mars as the destination. But the mission data reveals something remarkable about the path they're actually building. It doesn't go straight to Mars. It goes through the Moon first. And that's not a detour. That might be the most important engineering decision in the history of human spaceflight. Emma: What's striking is how this reframes the entire Moon-versus-Mars debate that has consumed space policy for decades. We're not choosing between two destinations. We're recognizing that one is the prerequisite for the other — that the Moon is essentially a classroom, a laboratory, and a proving ground sitting just three days from Earth, where every mistake is survivable and every lesson directly transfers to the planet that's 140 million miles further away. Emma: The question isn't whether we go to the Moon or Mars. It's whether we understand why the Moon is the only responsible path to Mars. It's time to understand this... deeply.

Michael: Welcome to Deeply. I'm Michael. Emma: And I'm Emma. Today we're examining a thesis that sounds intuitive on the surface but is far more nuanced than most people realize: that learning to live on the Moon isn't just helpful for getting to Mars — it's structurally necessary. And the reasons come down to physics, biology, and resource engineering in ways that most Mars-first advocates dramatically underestimate. Michael: Let's start with the foundational concept that shapes everything else — what we might call proximity-based risk management. This is the principle that the distance between a crew and Earth fundamentally determines what kinds of failures are survivable. On the International Space Station, orbiting about 250 miles up, an emergency evacuation takes hours. A Soyuz capsule or Crew Dragon is always docked and ready. On the Moon, that same evacuation takes roughly three days. That's tight, but manageable for most medical and mechanical emergencies. Michael: Mars changes the math completely. Depending on orbital alignment, a one-way trip takes six to nine months. Communication delays run between 4 and 24 minutes each way. There's no real-time conversation with mission control, no emergency resupply, no evacuation. You're on your own in a way that no human being has ever been on their own before. Emma: And this isn't just an abstract risk calculation. It has concrete design implications for every system on the spacecraft and the habitat. Life support, medical capability, food production, psychological support, equipment repair — all of it has to be designed for complete autonomy on Mars. The question is: how do you test systems that need to work perfectly for years, in an environment you've never lived in, when failure means death? Michael: The answer that's emerging from NASA, ESA, and increasingly from Christina Korp — who managed Buzz Aldrin's career for years and now leads the SPACE for a Better World foundation — is that you test those systems on the Moon first. Korp has been one of the most vocal advocates for this stepwise approach, arguing that the Moon offers what she calls an "environmental gradient" for training. You move humans progressively further from Earth, into progressively harsher conditions, while keeping the safety net of proximity. Emma: Think of it like medical residency. You don't hand a first-year medical student a scalpel and point them toward an operating room. You build complexity gradually. Simulated patients, then supervised procedures, then increasing independence. The Moon is the supervised procedure. Mars is the solo practice. And skipping the residency doesn't make you a faster doctor — it makes you a dangerous one. Michael: From a mission perspective, the numbers reinforce this. The Apollo missions gave us a total of roughly 16 person-days on the lunar surface across all six landings. Sixteen. That's less time than a two-week vacation. Artemis III, which landed astronauts on the Moon's south pole, extended that. But the real goal — the one that matters for Mars — is sustained presence. Weeks, then months, then eventually permanent habitation. Each extension tests systems under real conditions that no Earth-based simulation can replicate. Emma: And that's a crucial distinction. We have analogs on Earth — the Antarctic research stations, underwater habitats like Aquarius, isolation experiments like Mars-500 and SIRIUS. They're valuable. But they can't reproduce one-sixth gravity, they can't reproduce lunar regolith, they can't reproduce the radiation environment, and they can't reproduce the psychological reality of knowing that the nearest hospital is a quarter-million miles away.

Michael: So let's get specific about what the Moon actually teaches us. There are three major categories of challenge that Mars will present, and each of them has a lunar analog that's close enough to be genuinely instructive. Michael: First: regolith. Lunar dust is one of the most insidious hazards in space exploration. During Apollo, astronauts discovered that the stuff got everywhere — it abraded seals, clogged mechanisms, irritated lungs. Gene Cernan called it the single biggest operational problem on the Moon. And lunar regolith is nasty because it's never been weathered by water or wind. The particles are sharp, jagged, electrostatically charged, and they cling to everything. Emma: Mars has its own regolith problem, and in some ways it's worse. Martian soil contains perchlorates — toxic chemical compounds that are hazardous to human health. But the mechanical challenges of dust management — keeping it out of habitats, protecting equipment, filtering air systems — those are directly transferable from lunar experience. If you can engineer a habitat seal that keeps out lunar dust for six months, you've solved most of the dust ingress problem for Mars. Michael: Second challenge: radiation. Outside Earth's magnetosphere, humans are exposed to galactic cosmic rays and solar particle events. The Moon has no magnetic field and essentially no atmosphere, so surface radiation exposure is significant — roughly 60 times what you'd experience on Earth. Mars is slightly better; its thin atmosphere provides some shielding, reducing surface radiation to about 40 to 50 times Earth levels. But the transit to Mars, through open space for seven months, is the real killer. That's where cosmic ray exposure accumulates. Michael: The Moon lets us test radiation shielding materials, monitor long-term biological effects, and develop countermeasures — all within three days of Earth's medical facilities if something goes wrong. We can study how the human body responds to chronic radiation over months, adjust our shielding designs, and iterate. On a Mars transit, there's no iteration. Your shielding either works or it doesn't. Emma: If we put this in perspective, this is the environmental gradient training concept in action. You're not jumping from sea level to the summit of Everest. You're establishing base camps. The Moon is Camp 2. Mars transit is Camp 3. The Martian surface is Camp 4. Each stage introduces new stressors while building on the adaptations and technologies proven at the previous stage. Michael: The third challenge — and arguably the least understood — is partial gravity. The ISS has given us extensive data on microgravity's effects: bone density loss of about 1 to 2 percent per month, muscle atrophy, cardiovascular deconditioning, vision changes from intracranial pressure shifts. But we have almost zero data on partial gravity. The Moon's one-sixth g and Mars's three-eighths g are not zero gravity. They're not Earth gravity. They're something in between, and we genuinely don't know how the human body responds to years at those levels. Emma: This is one of the most significant gaps in our knowledge. Physiological and psychological adaptations to off-Earth living follow predictable patterns that can be studied and optimized — but only if you actually put humans in those environments and observe them. Short lunar stays during Apollo weren't long enough to generate meaningful physiological data on partial gravity adaptation. Extended stays of weeks to months on the Moon would be the first real experiment. Michael: I hadn't thought about it quite this starkly before, but the implication is significant. We are planning to send humans to live on Mars for potentially years at a time, in a gravitational environment we have literally never studied in any sustained way. The Moon offers the only accessible partial-gravity environment where we can begin gathering that data. Emma: Once you understand that, the whole picture changes. The Moon isn't a stepping stone in a poetic sense. It's a controlled experiment that fills in the blank pages of a textbook we need to have written before we attempt Mars.

Michael: Now, there's a fourth dimension to this that goes beyond human survival, and it might be the most consequential for long-term space settlement. It's called In-Situ Resource Utilization, or ISRU. The concept is straightforward: instead of launching everything you need from Earth — which costs roughly $10,000 to $20,000 per kilogram to low Earth orbit and far more to the lunar or Martian surface — you learn to use what's already there. Emma: And this is where the Moon becomes not just a training ground for human biology, but a training ground for industrial processes that Mars absolutely requires. Let me explain the mechanism. Mars has resources — water ice in subsurface deposits, carbon dioxide in its atmosphere that can be converted to oxygen and methane fuel, minerals in its soil. SpaceX's entire Starship architecture depends on manufacturing return-trip propellant on Mars using the Sabatier reaction, combining atmospheric CO2 with hydrogen to produce methane and water. Emma: But here's the structural challenge. No one has ever done industrial-scale chemical processing on another world. Not once. The equipment has never been tested in reduced gravity, in extreme temperature cycling, with alien feedstocks, under autonomous operation. Every component is unproven in its actual operating environment. Michael: The Moon offers a parallel ISRU challenge that's simpler but mechanistically similar. We now have strong evidence — confirmed by NASA's VIPER mission data and earlier observations from Chandrayaan and LCROSS — that the Moon's south pole contains significant water ice deposits in permanently shadowed craters. Extracting that water, electrolyzing it into hydrogen and oxygen, and using those products for life support and propellant — that's the same class of problem as Martian ISRU, just with different feedstocks. Michael: And the engineering breakthrough that makes this a genuine dress rehearsal is that the failure modes are the same. Dust contamination of processing equipment. Thermal management in extreme environments. Autonomous operation of chemical plants. Storage of cryogenic fluids. If your water extraction plant breaks down on the Moon, you've lost an experiment and you send a repair mission. If it breaks down on Mars, your crew may not have enough fuel to come home. Emma: Many people assume that because the Moon and Mars have different compositions — the Moon lacks a meaningful atmosphere, Mars has CO2 — the ISRU technologies don't transfer. But that's a misconception. The core engineering challenges are shared: how to mine regolith robotically, how to process raw materials in vacuum or near-vacuum, how to store and transport products, how to maintain equipment autonomously over years. The specific chemistry differs, but the systems engineering is directly applicable. Michael: So the Moon becomes a proof-of-concept factory. You demonstrate that humans and robots can extract resources from another world, process them into useful products, and sustain operations over extended periods. That demonstration — that existence proof — is what gives you confidence to attempt the same thing 140 million miles from any help. Emma: The broader significance is that ISRU transforms the economics of space exploration entirely. Without it, every Mars mission is a round trip fully loaded from Earth — enormously expensive and limited in duration. With proven ISRU, you can refuel on Mars, produce oxygen and water locally, and extend missions indefinitely. The Moon is where you prove the concept. Mars is where you deploy it.

Michael: Now, we need to address the strongest challenge to this entire framework, because there are serious people — engineers, planetary scientists, former NASA administrators — who argue that the Moon-first approach is fundamentally wrong. That it's not a stepping stone but a tar pit. A $100 billion distraction that delays the Mars missions that actually matter. Emma: The argument has real substance. Robert Zubrin, who wrote "The Case for Mars" and founded the Mars Society, has been making this case for over 30 years. His core claim is that the Moon and Mars are sufficiently different environments that lunar experience doesn't transfer as cleanly as advocates suggest. Mars has an atmosphere, different gravity, different resources, different thermal environment. The technologies you develop for the Moon — he argues — are lunar-specific technologies, not Mars technologies. Michael: And there's a programmatic argument too. Every dollar and every year spent building lunar infrastructure is a dollar and year not spent on Mars-specific development. The history of NASA is littered with stepping-stone programs that became ends in themselves. The Space Shuttle was supposed to enable a space station, which was supposed to enable deep-space missions. Decades passed. The stepping stones became the destination. Emma: Let me push back on that for a second, though, because the historical analogy cuts both ways. The reason previous stepping stones became dead ends wasn't inherent to the stepping-stone concept — it was because the programs lacked a clear Mars-forward architecture from the beginning. Artemis, at least in its current design, explicitly identifies Mars as the end goal and structures lunar activities around Mars-relevant technology demonstrations. Michael: That's true in principle, but I think Zubrin's concern deserves honest engagement. The question is whether the institutional incentives actually maintain that Mars focus. Lunar bases are politically appealing — they're visible, they're achievable on shorter timescales, they generate jobs in key congressional districts. Once you've built a permanent lunar presence, the political pressure to maintain and expand it could easily consume the budget that was supposed to fund Mars transit vehicles and Martian habitats. Emma: That's a legitimate institutional dynamics question. And I don't think anyone can guarantee it won't happen. But the alternative — going directly to Mars without lunar operational experience — carries its own enormous risk. Not political risk. Mortality risk. The question isn't whether the Moon-first path is perfect. It's whether the Mars-direct path is survivable. Michael: Okay, I need to sit with that for a moment, because it reframes the debate. Zubrin would say the risk is manageable with proper engineering and testing on Earth. Korp and the Moon-first advocates would say that no amount of Earth-based testing substitutes for operational experience in a real off-world environment. And the data from ISS — 25 years of continuous habitation — actually supports the Moon-first camp. Nearly every major system on the station has required repairs, modifications, or workarounds that weren't anticipated in ground testing. Emma: It's the same dynamic we saw with deep-sea exploration in the mid-twentieth century. The bathyscaphe Trieste didn't dive straight to the Mariana Trench. It made progressively deeper dives, testing pressure hull integrity, life support, and communication systems at each depth. Each dive revealed failure modes that ground testing had missed. The Moon is our continental shelf dive before the abyssal plunge.

Michael: So where does this leave us? Neither the Moon-first camp nor the Mars-direct camp is fully right, and the synthesis is more interesting than either position alone. Emma: The key insight — the one that ties everything together — is that the Moon-versus-Mars debate is really a debate about how humans learn to live in environments that are trying to kill them. And the answer from every analogous situation in history is the same: incrementally, with feedback loops, close enough to support that mistakes are survivable. Michael: The Antarctic analogy is instructive. The first permanent Antarctic stations in the 1950s weren't built because Antarctica was the ultimate destination. They were built because the science demanded presence, and the only way to learn how to sustain that presence was to do it — to discover that heating systems failed in unexpected ways, that human psychology deteriorated along specific timelines, that supply chains needed particular redundancies. Every lesson learned at McMurdo Station made subsequent stations more survivable. Emma: And the Moon offers something Antarctica never could — a genuinely alien environment that shares fundamental characteristics with Mars. Vacuum, radiation, regolith, reduced gravity, communication delays, resource scarcity. The fidelity of the analog is high enough that the lessons transfer, even if the specific parameters differ. Michael: What fascinates me about Christina Korp's framing is that she doesn't see the Moon as just a technical proving ground. She sees it as a sociological experiment. How do small groups of humans govern themselves when they're isolated? How do they allocate scarce resources? How do they maintain mental health over months of confinement? These are questions that no amount of engineering can answer. They require lived experience. And the Moon is the only place we can gather that experience without betting human lives on a seven-month journey with no return option. Emma: From a cosmological perspective, what we're really talking about is the first time a species deliberately learns to be multi-planetary. And that learning process has a structure. You don't skip steps in it any more than you skip steps in learning to walk. The crawling phase isn't a failure to walk — it's the necessary precursor. The Moon is the crawling phase of human expansion into the solar system. Michael: The mission data from Artemis and the lunar Gateway station — scheduled for crew operations in the late 2020s — will be the first real test of this framework. Gateway will orbit the Moon in a near-rectilinear halo orbit, providing a staging point for surface missions and, critically, a platform for studying deep-space radiation exposure and crew autonomy. It's designed explicitly as a Mars transit analog. Emma: And by 2030, if current timelines hold, we should have enough accumulated lunar surface time to begin answering the partial-gravity physiology questions, the ISRU feasibility questions, and the long-duration habitation psychology questions that Mars demands. Not perfectly. Not completely. But enough to make informed go/no-go decisions for Mars transit missions in the mid-2030s.

Michael: So what should a listener take away from all of this? Not a summary, but a shift in how you think about what's happening in space exploration right now, in 2026. Michael: The next time you see a headline about a lunar mission — Artemis, or a commercial lander, or a robotic ISRU demonstration — don't think of it as a Moon story. Think of it as a Mars story. Every system tested on the lunar surface, every month a crew spends in a lunar habitat, every kilogram of water extracted from a shadowed crater is a data point that makes Mars survivable. The Moon isn't the destination. It's the exam you have to pass before you're allowed to attempt the real thing. Emma: And the deeper lesson — the one that extends beyond space — is about how we approach any enormously complex, high-stakes endeavor. The temptation is always to leap straight to the ambitious goal. But the disciplines that succeed — medicine, aviation, deep-sea exploration — are the ones that build competence incrementally, that treat intermediate steps not as delays but as essential education. The Moon teaches us patience in pursuit of ambition. And that might be the most important lesson it has to offer. Michael: If you want more of this kind of thinking — the kind that goes past the headlines and into the structural logic of how things actually work — subscribe to Deeply wherever you get your podcasts. Emma: We're here every week, going deeper than anyone else. Thanks for spending this time with us. We'll see you next episode.