The Ben Mulroney Show - Will a city be built on the moon?

Episode Date: March 24, 2026

GUEST:  Carmi Levy/Tech Journalist If you enjoyed the podcast, tell a friend! For more of the Ben Mulroney Show, subscribe to the podcast! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://link.chtbl.com/bms⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Also, on youtube -- ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@BenMulroneyShow⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow Ben on Twitter/X at https://x.com/BenMulroney Insta: ⁠⁠⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠⁠⁠ Twitter: ⁠⁠⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠⁠⁠ TikTok: ⁠⁠⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠⁠⁠ Executive Producer:  Mike Drolet Reach out to Mike with story ideas or tips at [e-mail] Enjoy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast is brought to you by the National Payroll Institute, the leader for the payroll profession in Canada, setting the standard of professional excellence, delivering critical expertise, and providing resources that over 45,000 payroll professionals rely on. When West Jet first took flight in 1996, the vibes were a bit different. People thought denim on denim was peak fashion, inline skates were everywhere, and two out of three women rocked, the Rachel. While those things stayed in the 90s, one thing that hasn't is that fuzzy feeling you get when West Jet welcomes you on board. Here's to Westjetting since 96. Travel back in time with us and actually travel with us at westjet.com slash 30 years. At Desjardin, we speak business. We speak equipment modernization. We're fluent in data digitization and expansion into foreign markets.

And we can talk all day about streamlining manufacturing processes. Because at Desjardin business, we speak the same language you do. Business. So join the more than 400,000 Canadian entrepreneurs who already count on us and contact Desjardin today. We'd love to talk business. You know that I believe that breakfast cereal is specifically children's breakfast cereal should be consumed well into your 40s, 50s and 60s. You know that I love superhero movies. I love my kids. I love smash burgers. And I love space. I am very risk averse. But I would go to the I would I would jump on a rocket

and go to the moon and go to Mars tomorrow. Honestly, that's how much I love space. And I'm a Luddite about these things. However, my next guest is not a Luddite. In fact, he knows far more about this than most of us and most of you listening. Please welcome Carmi Levy. Tech journalist. Always great to talk to you.

Hi, Ben. So great to be with you. Yeah, what a day in space. I mean, I live for days like this. When big announcements happen and NASA's going to spend huge amounts of money on some of the coolest hardware and programming around. Yeah, so they've unveiled. One of the days we'll remember.

NASA has unveiled its new plans for a $20 billion moon base, but they've also paused the lunar gateway. So tell me about what they're accelerating and what they're slowing down. So the original plan was to have, it's called gateway. It's basically like a small version of the International Space Station, but in lunar orbit. And the plan was when people were going to fly to the moon,

they would stop off at Gateway first, then they would transfer onto the landing vehicle, and that would take them onto the surface of the Moon. Then when they were done on the Moon, they would fly back up to Gateway, get back on the Orion capsule, and then head back to Earth. Well, no more Gateway now. They're saying they're suspending it, and they're going to repurpose the hardware. The hardware is actually already built. But so how that will be repurposed because it was built for orbit?

Not quite sure. But the plan now is $20 billion they're going to spend, over the next seven years to establish a moon base. Okay. Because they don't just want to go once. They want to sustain their presence there. So put the money into building vehicles. Permanent base, exactly.

And the plan is, first they're going to build what they call temporary infrastructure so that it'll support kind of short visits and then over time build a permanent base that kind of like the ISS, there will always be astronauts on it. And they'll just sort of keep swapping them out, much like they do with the ISS.

And I know that other countries, I think China's trying to get to the moon, I think India is trying to get to the moon. What is the likelihood that anyone is going to beat the Americans to this milestone? I mean, China has been really pushing hard and a lot of the hardware that they would ultimately take to the moon. They've been testing robotics on the moon. They've got a rover on the far side of the moon right now and a number of other vehicles in orbit. And so they're pushing. Their Manda, their human space program is incredibly aggressive. And they could very well beat us to the moon by 2030.

And that's really what this is all about. It's almost like Space Race 2.0 beat China before 2030. And so the plan is they're still aiming to get humans somewhere up there by 2028. And then after the first five Artemis missions, Artemis 2 with Jeremy Hansen is supposed to go potentially next week. I know. Yeah, and the goal is, is right now, the plan was for a launch about every two years, which the administrator, Jared Eisengan says, not enough because you don't get the practice that enough. That institutional knowledge doesn't get kind of ingrained in your people. And so they will accelerate after Artemis 5 to two missions per year. And they're also, what's interesting here, it looks like the space launch system rocket, the big mega rocket that's now sitting on the pad. It looks like they're moving away from it. They are opening it up. They're issuing what's called an RFP, request for proposals, two commercial operators. They want two providers to essentially provide rockets to get to the moon and also capsules or some kind of vehicle for astronauts to go on.

But just under two years ago, we saw, and I appreciate the need to diversify and not put all your eggs in the SpaceX basket, but they did this with Boeing. And we saw what happened with Boeing and those astronauts got stranded in space and the only way, they could get home was thanks to Elon Musk, demonstrating at least to get to this Luddite, that there's only one game in town that can do the things that we demand as human beings as a civilization

that are striving for the stars. And that's Elon Musk and SpaceX. And of course. So why they, well, like, you don't repeat the mistakes of the past. Does anyone think that Boeing has learnt enough to have surpassed the ethic? the work ethic and the quality of work and the products that Elon Musk and SpaceX have produced, or is this just the theater of it all to show that they are, this is an open bidding process?

There's certainly a lot of theater there. I think Boeing is at a disadvantage here since the Starliner contract was awarded. Along has come Blue Origin, which is now pushing very hard to be the next alternative to SpaceX. And Northrop Grumman is also producing. It produced much of the hardware for the Gateway Project. and they're now a trusted vendor as well. And so there are a lot of other players now, including some of them who are building commercial space stations

for low Earth orbit, they could potentially also bid on this moon project as well. They also may have the expertise as alternatives to Boeing. So I think what NASA is trying to do, they were stung by what happened with Starliner, and they're trying to spread the risk, get more companies involved so that you don't have to lean on Boeing, Don't have to lean on SpaceX that there's, and they will ultimately want to have two providers. So if there's a problem with one architect, you've got a second one to suppress the button and go.

But when they do that, does there have to be some alignment in terms of, you know, so that the NASA hardware can work just as well with one provider as it can with the other? It certainly does. And that's sort of part of all of this is developing architectures or common architectures that allow anyone, equipment to essentially plug in. So, for example, if you're going to have a landing system, it'll have to use the same docking arrangements. It'll have to use similar parts and similar protocols and training. Yeah, you don't want an Apollo 13 issue where they had to repurpose, you know, something

that was intended for one use, but then they needed it for survival or for re-entry for another, and they would have to McGaver those things. You don't want to have, you don't want to have to have those problems. You want those all solved before you go up. That's exactly. So no more, there were the carbon dioxide scrubbers on the command module, the lunar module, that were completely different because two different providers had two different designs.

And so in this case, everyone talks to everyone else. Everyone shares information on what those standards are. And everyone ensures that, you know, we call this in the IT industry, interoperability is kind of like you're guiding, your guiding methodology that everyone's stuff plugs into everyone else's stuff. and it works. That also reduces costs because it means you're not creating proprietary hardware every time you're flying. Everyone's using the same standard. Last question for you. And I know we had a whole bunch of other questions, but you're not going to

get me off of space once we start. I'm there with you. Yeah. Listen, so China may very well get to the moon first, which then seems like a whole new chapter. I mean, if you haven't watched for all mankind, I'm going to be talking about forever. It's the same thing. The Russians got there first in that world. The Chinese may get there. But the point isn't the moon. The point is to get to Mars. Exactly.

And it feels to me that even if the Chinese get to the moon first, nobody can, nobody has the reach and the, nobody has the technology to go to another planet the way that America does. Not at this point. And certainly, sort of bury in this, in this announcement, it was called Ignition, was an announcement of something called Space Reactor One Freedom. So they're going to fly this thing to Mars. is before the end of 2028. It's a robotic spacecraft propelled by a new generation of nuclear reactor. So a standard technology

that allows vehicles to get to Mars a lot faster and allows them to carry a lot more hardware. Yes, they're carrying... Promise you, they're going to have a thousand optimist robots. They're going to build a habitat so that when the robots, when the humans get there, it's all ready to go. Carmi Levy, thank you very much.

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