How to build a lunar mass driver

Casey Handmer May 2026 What? Elon has recently (late 2025, early 2026) been talking about building many terawatts of orbital AI compute and launching some components from Moon factories with a mass driver. This is an old idea, enabled by the Moon’s relatively low gravity and lack of an atmosphere. See, for example, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and The High Frontier. The fundamental problem with The High Frontier is that the set of products that can be made in space and sold on Earth while making money is very limited, due to the sheer cost and difficulty of accessing space. In general, they are observations and communication, which in both cases distributes the product using radio waves, which are much cheaper than physical return of artifacts from space. In 2019, I wrote that Starlink was likely to be incredibly lucrative and I’m happy to see this is the case, with over $10b in revenue last year. Space AI takes this business model and ramps it up to 11. Why? Starlink has already…