# Moon factories could lower the cost of sending materials to Mars

Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/s/moon-factories-could-lower-the-cost-of-sending-materials-to/ on Real Alpha, the best minutes from long interviews with the people building AI. Cite and link the page, not this copy.

- Speaker: [David Friedberg](https://realalpha.app/people/david-friedberg/) · David Friedberg is an entrepreneur, investor and podcaster. · Founded The Climate Corporation, sold to Monsanto for about $1.1B in 2013.
- Host: [Chris Williamson](https://realalpha.app/people/chris-williamson/) · Host, Modern Wisdom
- Show: Modern Wisdom
- Episode: [Everything You Know Is About to Collapse - David Friedberg](https://realalpha.app/v/8s2nO_hxbLA/), Apr 13, 2026
- Moment: 21:30 to 26:58 of the episode (5 min), playing on https://realalpha.app/s/moon-factories-could-lower-the-cost-of-sending-materials-to/; the episode from there: https://realalpha.app/v/8s2nO_hxbLA/?t=1290

## Quote

> “it would take about uh call it a **nine kilometer long track** to move one ton of material off of the moon and get it to mars”
> — [David Friedberg](https://realalpha.app/people/david-friedberg/) at [23:55](https://realalpha.app/v/8s2nO_hxbLA/?t=1435) · Modern Wisdom

## Takeaways

1. Launching materials from the Moon could take less energy than from Earth.
2. A nine-kilometre mass driver could send one-ton parcels toward Mars.
3. Robots could build mining, factory and rail infrastructure on the Moon.

## About this segment

David Friedberg argues that low lunar gravity and no atmosphere make the Moon a launch base, with robots building factories and a railgun sending materials to Mars. It’s a concrete case for space industry beyond exploration.

From “Everything You Know Is About to Collapse - David Friedberg”, Apr 13, 2026. [Watch the full episode](https://realalpha.app/v/8s2nO_hxbLA/)

## Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

[21:34](https://realalpha.app/v/8s2nO_hxbLA/?t=1294) modern wisdom at checkout what's happening with the moon um well so i i think that you know there's a big discussion obviously um i would say largely led by pushed by elon but but many others over time that, you know, we should expand humans beyond Earth and get to Mars and that's a good place to set up a colony and yada yada, right? Mars is not very habitable. We need to move a lot of material to Mars. But I think if you look at the math, it is very likely the case that you can probably reduce your energy cost needs to move material to set up a colony on Mars by probably 100x or more by making most of the material you need for Mars on the moon and shipping it from the moon to mars and the reason is the moon unlike the earth does not have an atmosphere one of the biggest uses of the energy when you're moving matter off

[22:30](https://realalpha.app/v/8s2nO_hxbLA/?t=1350) The Earth is getting away from, through the atmosphere, which drags or pushes the rocket back down, and gravity. So the moon is one-sixth the gravity of the Earth. So it takes much less energy to escape the gravitational pull of the moon than it does the Earth. And there's no atmosphere pulling you back. So with AI and robotics, it is theoretically possible. And then if you look at moon dust and moon rock, it has all of the raw materials that we may need to build machines, to build housing units, to build habitation units.

[23:00](https://realalpha.app/v/8s2nO_hxbLA/?t=1380) What's the constituent policy? It's got aluminum, it's got silicon, it's got carbon. You can even go up to the poles and you can get hydrogen and oxygen from the ice up there. So you can melt the water at the poles, run electricity through it, break it into hydrogen and oxygen, use the hydrogen and oxygen and the carbon in various chemical reactions. You can theoretically make any substance you need or any metal or any material you need that we can make here on Earth.

[23:22](https://realalpha.app/v/8s2nO_hxbLA/?t=1402) So we can and should build very large factories on the moon. And the way that this would work is you basically can use solar power, right? Solar, very deployable on the moon, lots of sunlight, no atmosphere, et cetera. Good continuous energy flow, no clouds. And then you can use kind of battery storage. But the mechanism for moving material off the moon is not propulsion. It's actually a mass driver, so electric rail gun.

[23:50](https://realalpha.app/v/8s2nO_hxbLA/?t=1430) So think about like a train track, you know, like these maglev trains, you know, think about like a maglev train. and uh you know if you run the calculations it would take about uh call it a nine kilometer long track to move one ton of material off of the moon and get it to mars okay at an angle so here's the thing it doesn't actually even have to be in an angle it just has to clear any craters or mountains it's flat enough and that's escape velocity just escape velocity yeah so all you have to do is orient it correctly put it on the right part of the moon and orient it correctly for the moon to basically uh aim that's right the moon's passing around and it would take yeah it would take a couple megawatt hours of power to push a ton of material down this rail track it would take about four and a half seconds for it to move down the rail track and then hit four and a half seconds

[24:42](https://realalpha.app/v/8s2nO_hxbLA/?t=1482) to move nine kilometers nine kilometers yeah so it is it ends up escaping at roughly call it 20,000 kilometers an hour and that's now uh if you're moving one ton of material you would still need a couple hundred kilograms, call it about 200 kilograms of some sort of propulsion. To slow it down. To slow it down as it approaches the moon. But here's the other thing. You could use moon rock as a heat shield for re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere or the Martian atmosphere.

[25:08](https://realalpha.app/v/8s2nO_hxbLA/?t=1508) So you basically take moon rock, put it on the front, because you don't care if it burns away and goes away. It can just vaporize. So you need 15 centimeters of moon rock on the front of this parcel. You ship the parcel off this rail track. It goes towards Mars. It can hit 100 Gs of acceleration while it's accelerating. Gets over there. You slow it down a little bit, and then it can actually enter the Martian atmosphere.

[25:28](https://realalpha.app/v/8s2nO_hxbLA/?t=1528) The moon rock burns away, you've just delivered roughly 700 kilograms of material. And you can run that every hour with solar panels that are roughly 500 kind of meters by 500 meters. So, you know, pretty small kind of solar system, some batteries, some capacitors, and then you got to build the rail. The rail, you need about nine tons of material. So you got to get a lot of material put out to get this rail built. But again, the amazing thing about AI is you can kind of think about it being self-replicating in the physical sense, as well as the digital sense, you can put robots on the Martian surface with the necessary starting equipment that can make the next robots, that can then make the next robots, that can then go do the mining, that can then go build the factories, that can then go build the rail, that can then go build the propulsion system, and can then do the mining

[26:14](https://realalpha.app/v/8s2nO_hxbLA/?t=1574) for you. And there's a lot of very valuable material on the moon that we could also ship back to Earth. So I actually think the moon is going to be a giant, giant, giant economy. And I think it's like one of these economies, like it's almost like the East India or like, You know, like when you get over there, you don't realize how big it's going to be until this starts. But once it starts, the value of what you can do and the low cost nature of it because of AI now that you can have robots doing this stuff and you can have AI orchestrate a lot of work and you don't need to commit millions of people to it and trillions and you still need some money, but not trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars.

[26:45](https://realalpha.app/v/8s2nO_hxbLA/?t=1605) I think the moon is probably one of these like more under discussed in Silicon Valley kind of economic, grand economic opportunities. Is space the next industrial revolution?