What's Your Problem?Forrest Meyen is the co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Lunar Outpost, a company that builds machines that go to places like Mars and, if everything goes according to plan, the moon. The company is betting that the private space boom of the past decade will soon go beyond Earth’s orbit to the moon and beyond.
Pushkin, tell me about Moxie.
Yeah, okay, so Moxie. Moxie is a very very cool device. It's a small box the size of a kind of a toaster oven, and it is actually kind of like a toaster because it gets quite hot. But it's inside the NASA Perseverance Rover.
And just to be clear, where is the NASA Perseverance Rover.
Oh, it's on Mars. Yeah.
I'm Jacob Goldstein and this is What's Your Problem, the show where I talk to people who are trying to make technological progress. My guest today is Forest Mayan. He's the co founder and chief strategy officer of Lunar Outpost. It's a company that builds machines that go places.
Like Mars and soon also to the Moon.
Forest and his company are part of this space boom that is happening right now. We've seen it over the past decade or so with private rockets, cheaper space flights, and all kinds of new satellite applications. The bet that Forest is making at Lunar Outpost is that soon this boom will go beyond Earth's orbit, to the Moon and eventually beyond that. I talked with Forest about the Moon, about what private exploration of the Moon will look like and what problems Lunar Outpost is trying to solve to make that happen. But we started out by talking about Moxie, which Forest started working on as a grad student at MIT, even before he started Lunar Outposts, and that is on Mars right now. So what does Moxie do.
So briefly, what Moxie does is it breathes in carbon dioxide from the atmosphere of Mars, and it breathes out oxygen as well as a little bit of carbon monoxide.
Like a plant, like what a tree does on Earth.
It's basically a tree, except we can control control how much oxygen it makes. And you know it does have some less than desirable byproducts, but that is not an issue in the total atmosphere of Mars.
And I mean, I could guess why it would be useful to have a machine, a device that could turn carbo dioxi into oxygen on Mars, But tell me why is that useful?
Sure? So, I think most people when they think about in a device that can make oxygen on Mars, the first thing they think about is, oh, of course, people need to breathe on Mars, and that's certainly the case. Producing oxygen for human life support is important. The real reason why we want to produce it is actually to make oxygen for rocket propel. It when you have a rocket at for example, a oxygen methane rocket, seventy eight percent of the mass of the propellant is just the oxidizer. It's the oxygen. It's something we don't notice on Earth when we're driving a combustion car because the oxygen's all the way around us and it's free. But that's a huge amount of mass. And so by making that there, we can basically save billions of dollars of shipping twenty to thirty tons of oxygen needed to be on the surface of Mars just to get astronauts back up off the surface of Mars and back home.
Uh huh.
So it's the underlying idea, like the hardest part of go to Mars is coming back to Earth.
That's one hundred percent the case. Yeah, And you know right now NASA is trying to do sample return, right. They want to bring a couple of rocks back and it's looking to be a very very expensive endeavor. So when you imagine the idea of bringing people back. That's really the key challenge. And we're talking billions of dollars of savings, maybe reducing completely eliminating three to six launches of like the NASAs Space launch System just to get the materials over there. Because anything that you have on the surface of Mars you have to burn field to get it into Earth orbit. You have to burn field to get it to Mars. You have to burn field to get all the stuff that's needed to actually land it on the surface of Mars.
Yeah. No, it's intuitive that it's hard to take a bunch of rocket fuel to Mars. I feel like that to la birth that is straightforward. And to be clear, Maxia is a sort of proof of concept, right. It's small, it's not like industrial scale, but is the notion that you could build a really big one using the same principles if you need it to or when the time comes exactly.
Yeah, that was the purpose of it. I mean the Maxis comes from the idea of in situ resource utilization and more simply, it's living off the land on other planetary bodies.
And living off the land is kind of your big idea, right, I feel like that's the big idea of your company. Yeah, understand it. Of your work is let's figure out how to live off the land on the moon.
On Mars exactly. Yeah, that's the underlying theme everywhere, and we're just laying down the bricks to build the road to make that kind of part of a sustainable future in space.
So tell me about when Moxie first got to Mars. You know, so you're working on this thing for years. It actually goes on a rocket ship, it goes to Mars, it lands on Mars. Is there some moment when you're like whatever, somebody's at the computer that's like, okay, let's turn it on and see if it works.
So, I mean the first the first exciting part was, you know, did it land right? Like obviously, going to Mars that's pretty scary. Lots of things can go wrong. So it landed great. And then we go into this initial phase where we're checking out the systems of the vehicle. So it goes through the list and our checkout was you know, one item in that list, and Maxie.
Is just like a little like toaster of insized box inside the rover somewhere correct whatever, the belly of the rover something just.
Yeah, basically just sit in the belly of the rover. It has a little filtered to the outside of the rover, and so the rover like turns on, it goes through its list, and then the satellites are orbiting Mars. There's like five different satellites and when one gets overhead then it can send some data back. And so generally you see a command and you don't get information back on if it worked until the next day. So in the next day, the real exciting moment is not not when it actually happened, but when you actually downlink the data and you open up the file and you see what's there. And so that very first checkout, you know, we open up the file, we see what's there, we saw it turned on. That was kind of the.
Okay, that's that's non trivial, it's step one, so okay.
Then then the next checkout was basically to turn it on and run the pump, which was also kind of another incremental step. But then the very exciting moment, of course, as you can imagine, is kind of the third time we actually sent commands to the rover is when we were going to heat up the cells. So the chemistry happens at eight hundred degrees celsius. Very hot, because it's really hot, yeah, very hot, Like I said, like a toaster, like a.
Really hot toaster, right, very hot.
Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah yeah, so hot that normal metals and stuff. You got to use special metals so things don't melt in the grade. So it heats up. The scroll pub starts pumping, the gas goes in and then it's this chemical reaction happens on these ceramic cells that allow the and you apply a voltage across it, and then the voltage pulls strips oxygen ions off of the cells and actually bounces it through this kind of ceramic material and then it joins up with our oxygen on the other side. And then you get the data of the current flow, which tells you how much oxygen was produced.
So, so is there a day. Is there a day when you come in and turn on your computer and see if moxie actually produced oxygen? Yeah?
So we knew and downlink was going to happen. Everyone was on zoom. This was in the middle of the pandemic, so everyone's remote and we pull up the data. You know this It took many years to happen. So one of the students that was actually an intern under me that I kind of mentored on Moxie. Her name's Maya. She was the one kind of unzipping the data. Fen she pulls up the plots, We get the data and then we see the little line that goes across of you know, oxygen production, and then we knew he did it, and that was it was a big moment. I think that was, oh, you know, like five and a half years, you know, five years into my experience being on the program. So it was you know, you've been waiting a long time for something you think it's hard to wait for, you know, as a kid waiting for Christmas, Like, uh, is at least that exciting, I would hope.
So I would hope it's more exciting because like it might not work, right, Lots of things go to Mars and don't work. Like that's not a it's not a crazy outcome for a thing do not work. So Moxie worked. By the way, what does Moxie stand for?
In the great tradition of aerospace, it's a acronym with an acronym in it, So Moxie stands for Mars oxygen ISRU. Experiment ISRU stands for institu Resource Utilization.
I want it to be I wanted to be like seven acronyms deep. I want it to be an acronym with it. I wanted to be a Russian doll of acronyms. I did notice when I was prepairing for this interview, like all of the different missions and all of your different vehicles, they work like everything is an acronym, and the first time like, oh, Moxie, that's clever, and then by the seventh acronym you're like, I don't even want to know. So okay, So you built Moxie. Somewhere along the way between when you started work looking on it and when you found out that it worked, you started a company. So just stepping back, then, what is your your dream really for your work and for lunar outposts, Like, what's your big idea?
Yeah, I think the the big idea is to and is to really utilize the Moon as Earth's next continent, right, Like, you have the Moon up there, it's not that far away, and it's full of resources that could be used for the electrification of vehicles on Earth that could be used to send us out deeper into space, and the you know, the environmental cost of utilizing these resources on the Moon is almost non existent. Right. You can basically offshore a lot of these challenges that are done with development on Earth onto the Moon in a much kind of safer environment. And so that's that's kind of the broad vision, right, is to really utilize the Moon to benefit everyone here back on Earth.
Clearly, at this moment, it's very very very very expensive to get to the Moon and back, right, Yeah, like whatever a million dollars a kilogram or something makes it hard for minding to make economic sense. I mean, is that the big barrier? It just cost so much to get there and back.
Yeah, I would say that. And then you know, there's certain types of like processing techniques that you need to solve. And then for us, it's you know, the reliable robotics, and that's what we're focusing on. We see a lot of the barriers coming down. When Elon Musk is talking about you know, starship, we think that's going to make a huge step change in the amount of mass that can be brought to and from the Moon, and that's going to forever change humanity's relationship with the Moon, because it it will go from you know, millions of dollars per kilogram to get to the Moon to hundreds of thousands overnight. And I think in a shorter period of time than that you could be looking at ten thousand dollars or less per kilogram.
So you're talking about like one hundred x improvement in efficiency. Like, yeah, I thing that costs a dollar net will cost a penny. Yeah, what five years? Ten years?
Yeah, I mean it could come as soon as five years that I guess those initial starship launches, and then within ten years it's going to be there.
I mean, is that the underlying bet of your company. You're sort of riding on that on the back of that bet.
It's coming down the pipe, and I think we're timing it right. In the near term, we've found ways to basically provide services here and now that are in high demand, which is basically just access to explore the lunar surface to do interesting commercial experiences as well as help other nations kick off their space programs on the lunar surface.
So let's talk about what you're working on now. I know you have a few different projects, a few different acronymst little machines going too the Moon soon, right, Like, what's the what's the first one? What do you have that's about to go to the Moon?
What is it?
And when's it going to go?
Yeah, So our first one, we've been calling them lunar voyages, So Lunar Voyage one is going to be our map rover, and this one is going to go basically early twenty twenty four. So we're getting ready. We're just kind of figuring out when the when the launch is going to be with the rockets, I.
Feel like in space terms, that's like five minutes from now.
Oh yeah, yeah, the vehicle is you know, we're we're packing up the vehicle and getting it down to the Lander provider. So this is yeah, it's it's all the hard work's been done on this vehicle. What's unique about this this mission a couple of things. Is kind of in a race to be the first commercial rover ever to the surface of the Moon India Center Rover, you know, Russia has of course the United States and China, but we would be a commercial company from Golden Colorado sending a commercial rover, and so to do that, we've partnered with different commercial companies, so We have no Kia that's testing LTE technology on the Moon. We have Mi T and NASA aimes have some cool cameras that we're sending, and a little miniature rover that drives on top of our rover. We have a company that's put a private key for a Bitcoin treasure chest on the rover, so if you find our rover, you get a treasure chest. So I mean it's all business, right.
Yeah, you can put a giant billboard on the Moon. So when I look at the Moon, I see an ad for bitcoin. Don't do it?
Well? Yeah, the scale of that be outrageous.
Yes, and not just the scale. So when you're making a point about being the first commercial rover, like, why does that matter? What does it mean? I mean, are there legal implications? Is it just cool? From a business standpoint?
I think it matters because it emphasizes the shift in Earth's relationship with the Moon, where the Earth is just not for the big dogs in you know, on the national stage, right, the big countries with massively funded programs. If commercial company can get to the Moon, that means the Moon's for everyone, right, And we also kind of remove some of the gatekeepers of access to the Moon. Right, So the research group from MIT was able to raise funding with some of their supporters to put a some payloads on the Moon, right. I mean that's and without having to go through a big long proposal process and all sorts of other things. That just hoping to try to get your experiment to the moon, which is kind of the you know, the old way of doing it. So but we're definitely like broadening the reach of who can go there and do interesting and exciting things and really really form a stronger connection with the Moon that you know, we see every single night.
In a minute, how forrest rover is getting to the Moon and what could go wrong once it gets there? Now back to the show, how's your rover getting to the Moon?
It's being packaged into a lander built by intuitive machines. That lander is and going into a SpaceX Falcon nine rocket, and then that rocket is going to launch from Kennedy Space Center, Florida.
So even the rocket is private, like the whole it's sort of end to end a private mission as opposed to kind of piggybacking on a government mission.
Correct. Correct, Now, the NASA has made some really smart choices that have enabled this to happen, and there is definitely NASA money involved in order to make the whole kind of help build the road to space. So NASA started a program called the Commercial Lunar Payloads Services Program where they're contracting lunar landers to send NASA payloads to the Moon, but they're allowing these landers to sell extra space to commercial interests in order to reduce NASA's costs but also kind of open it up. And so we've taken advantage of it. So the Intuitive Machines Lander that we're going on has a lot of NASA funded payloads and a lot of NASA funding, and we're kind of on the ride share side, so we're just hitching a ride on another vehicle.
So, you know, I I'm very pro progress, pro technology, pro private enterprise, but there is some part of me, some hippyish part of me that's like a little bit sad about mining the Moon and you know, bitcoin on the Moon, Like, I don't know, can you talk me out of being sad about that side of it?
Yeah, certainly. So I think there's enough moon for everyone. You know, the visible change will not exist. You know, you'll still see the moon, It'll still be there. We're not gonna have any impact on the total mass of the Moon or how the tides change or anything like that. This is very minuscule compared to the size of it. And the other thing is like, we're you know, taking philosophies I leave no trace and things like that to make sure that, you know, we don't leave a mess up there, right. We want to do this in a way where we're not polluting the environment in a way that it makes it difficult for other people to go to the Moon and utilize it in the future. And I think that's another important point to take home.
Is there some kind of international law? Is there a treaty or something that governs behavior of individuals, firms, nations on the moon.
Yeah, so there's there's a number of like agreements in place. I think the most recent one that NASA is trying to bring nations into is kind of like the Artemis Accords, which kind of lays a groundwork for some you know, rules on the surface of the Moon. NASA's actually been trying.
To Countries can't even agree to rules on Earth, right, it seems hard. It seems like a hard problem. I mean, I wouldn't imagine for example, China, which has its own space wanting to sort of follow the United States lead. Yeah, and how is it going?
Yeah? And there there are countries that are not right and there's not a really established, universally accepted authority over the moon. So that is one of the most interesting things about this endeavor is how will that shake up? Because there may be even disagreements of countries if our rover even has a right to drive across the moon, right, Yeah, but we're going to be there, and we're going to drive across the moon, and you know, it's accepted by the country where we live, and so there's there's a lot of stuff that's going to have to be sorted out. But like any frontier, I think that little bit of kind of uncertainty creates opportunities for the early movers to kind of help shape what that looks like.
So you built this rover that's going to go to the Moon soon. It's called MAP. I guess we got to do the acronym. What's MAP stand.
For Mobile Autonomous Prospecting Platform.
Okay, what's it look like? What's MAP look like?
It's a four wheeled rover. You know, you often see a lot with like six wheels. Map has four wheels.
How big is it? How big is it?
It's the size of some people say like a like a medium sized dog. So it's maybe like a you know, two feet by two feet square. Definitely not huge. So it has it has two cameras or eyes right on top of its front, and then it has another camera that kind of looks like a little nose. And now we've added the MIT camera payload below that, so you can even say, maybe that looks like a mouth, but yeah, it actually sees like a like a human as well. So the two cameras on the front, I'll give it stereoscopic vision, so it can kind of see in three D as it drives across the surface. So for this first mission, as I mentioned, one of our flagship customers is Nokia, and we're testing their antenna system. And so the rover has these big antennas in the in the back that will actually deploy on the surface, so there's a trust structure, and then we'll fire some pins and they'll flip up in the air. And that's so that their antennas are nice and high off the ground so we can maximize the range of the rover.
And the idea is to have a basically wireless communications and network on the moon. That's kind of what you're testing with that.
Yep.
Yeah, how do you drive it? How do you tell the rover where to go?
It's kind of like a like a turn based strategy game. That's kind of like the speed of it. You know, we'll send a command, we'll get some information back. We'll do that again. So example would be like a waypoint command. So we'd say, you know, drive two meters forward one meter to the left, and then the rover would drive, uh huh, take a picture, send it back. We'll tell them if you did a good job or not, and then we'll repeat the problem us again.
So so you built this thing. It's a big deal. It's going to go to the Moon. It's hard to build a thing that can work on the moon. I'm sure, what what are you worried about? What might not work?
Let's see, there's a lot of uncertainty, just like just like going to Mars. I think everyone's always nervous about landing and getting off safely. We saw that, you know, Russia had a lander that crashed this year. There's a Japanese startup that had a lander that crashed this year, and then you had the Indian Lander that landed safely. So for this year, you know, two out of three didn't make it. So that's always a concern. Even though I have lots and lots of confidence in our partners, they have developed an excellent system, really high reliability, it always comes to the back of your mind. And then after that, I mean, we're going to turn on in transit, so we're already going to be on, so we're not gonna have to worry about, oh, will it even turn on? And then the next thing is, you know, how what does the surface look like at this area? Like are we are we able to traverse it? Are we in like a big boulder field? Where are we going to land? I think that's the other uncertainty because no one has ever been to this part of the moon and the highest Wow, yeah, yeah, this is We're going to Shackleton Connecting Ridge, which is within a degree of the lunar South Pole. So for example, the next closest was sixty nine degrees south, which is what the Indian Lander went, and so no one's been there, no one knows what it looks like. The best satellite images are like three to ten meters per pixel, right, so you that's just one pixel covering a large area.
Giant boulders. You could land and just be surrounded by giant boulders and you'd be.
Screwed, right, Yeah, boulders or you know who knows? Quicksand aliens? We think we you have a really good idea of what to find there, but you never.
Know, right, Aliens would be cool. I'd be sorry your rover didn't work, but it'd be a worthwhile trade of Okay, So these are all things that could go wrong that wouldn't be your fault. Right If the lander crashes, they didn't build the lander. If there's boulders everywhere, who knew they were boulders? What about if you land and it's nice and smooth and everybody else did their job. Now it's go, time for map, Go time for your rover. What are some of the things that might go wrong.
Yeah, One of the ones that is very concerning is the dust. So basically, the Moon's been bombarded by micrometeoroids for four billion years or something around that time, and so the surface has been ground up continuously by these things flying in from space. Hitting the ground, turning into glass, shattering and then getting pulverized over and over. But there's no weathering effects like wind or water that kind of round out these particles. So you're talking about very sharp particles like I don't know if asbestos is a good example, but it's it's nasty, nasty stuff that could grind on your gears and systems, and so we have to try to find ways to keep that off. There could be dust that's levitated that could get on the camera lenses and make it harder to see. The other thing is you're on the moon, so there's a decent amount of radiation. Radiation could cause faults and electronic components, so we try to mitigate that by having you know, back up electronic systems and failovers and things like that. But there's you know, certain levels that you can't control. Right Let's say an ion just flies in from deep space and like you know, blows a hole through a transistor. There's not much you can do. So then you have that. You have obviously that you know, the sun is at a very low angle, there's very long shadows, and when you go into a shadow you get extremely cold. So those are kind of the big environmental concerns. It's a it's not a comfortable place to be.
So if you step back from the day to day, from the rover that's about to go to the Moon and think about the future, you tell me what the right amount of time is, I don't know, five years, ten years, Like, how do you think about the future on the moon. What's the moon going to be like in say ten years?
I think ten years is going to be really exciting. I mean in ten years, what you're going to have is NASA astronauts are going to return to the Moon, you know, within five years less than that, and so we'll have people actively on the surface of the Moon. Hopefully they'll be riding around in a you know, lunar outpost moon buggy. So we've were waiting here back from NASA on a proposal. We have a great team with Lockey Martin MDA GM Goodyear to build this moon buggy for them. So hopefully they're driving around these moon buggies. Hopefully they're you know, you have the first human permanent human habitats within ten years, and hopefully there's some commercialization of those habitats.
That one seems wildly ambitious, Like, given how long it's taken just to get people there, do you really think there might be permanent human habitats on the Moon in ten years? I feel like in space, you know, I'll take the over.
I think that's currently there's architectures that are being pursued by multiple international space agencies, whether it's you know, Russia, China, United States, that will put human habitats on the Moon within ten years.
The fact that you say there's multiple countries makes me think it's more likely. Right, Like, in the same way there was a space race in the sixties basically for like not entirely happy reasons, right, the US was kind of goaded into doing things maybe more quickly than it would have done. Like that seems like a plausible mechanism, a kind of international competition for slightly tense reasons. Like when you put it that way, it's like, Okay, maybe things will go faster than they usually do. Yeah, I mean, there's always things that can happen, But I think that that there is going to be some competition. I think that that China is very motivated and they've been very successful in executing their lunar campaigns, and look they've been to the Moon like three times, and the United States has yet to return to the Moon since they first left in Apollo. So we're the United States is not leading at this point on lunar surface explorations. So we have a lot of catching up to do, and we're putting a lot of resources to it. But I think that.
Hopefully, you know, we realize that the competition's there, and we rise to meet it because it's happening. Other people are going. They're not, you know, not waiting for the United States anymore.
We'll be back in a minute with the Lightning Round. That's the end of the ads. Now we're going back to the show.
We're gonna finish with the Lightning Round. Just a bunch of questions slightly more random than the rest of the interview. Do you want to go to space?
Yes?
Do you think you'll go to space?
No?
Why not?
I'm too busy making robots.
Rocketman or Major Tom, Major Tom, Star Wars or Star Trek, Star Trek. Favorite scene in The Martian I don't know.
I liked when he was grown the potatoes. That was pretty cool.
Also loved loved the potatoes. So it's like the most nerdy basic part. Right. That was what made me so happy about that book and movie was not the like flying on the chair in space part, but kind of the opposite. The potatoes are the opposite.
Of that lighting the gas making it rain inside. That's cool.
What's the hardest thing about killing your own meat?
If it's an animal that you grew, you know, sometimes you're a little sad, but you're kind of thankful for the time that you got to spend with it.
Are you thinking of chickens?
Think about turkeys. I have turkeys. I absolutely love turkeys. They're fantastic animals. They're so nice.
I mean, you don't have to eat them, you could. You're happier to kill the chickens.
Yeah, chickens aren't that nice. So it's getting that time for the for the turkeys, But it also gives them a reason to be so.
I mean, it's not their reason to be, it's your reason for them to be.
Exactly.
Yeah, if everything goes well, what problem will you be trying to solve in five years or so?
In five years, I think the big problem is going to be kind of processing of lunar regolith to sort it out into its kind of constituent components. Hopefully in five years we've got used.
You used a word that I don't know what's that word.
It's a it's a fancy term for lunar dirt or lunar soil.
So if things go well, you'll you'll be mining in some fashion the moon and trying to figure out how to actually make that work exactly. Well, thanks for your time, it was a delight to talk to you, and good luck get into the moon.
Thank you appreciate it.
Forrest Mayan is the co founder and chief strategy officer at Lunar Outpost. Today's show was produced by Edith Russolo and edited by Karen Chakerji. You can email us at problem at pushkin dot fm.
I'm Jacob Goldstein, H
