Casey Handmer warns China could reach the moon by 2029 — and NASA bureaucracy is the real obstacle

So, uh, welcome to the studio, Casey. How you doing? I'm I'm very well, thanks. Thanks for having me. Great to have you as always. Uh, what what triggered this initial tweet about 1600 1640 days until China takes the moon? I imagine that that's, uh, based on a specific mission that they have planned.

But, uh, break that down because they've done stuff before. They've landed on the moon before with autonomous stuff. Like, why is this different? Why is this date so important? Yeah, China set a target of being on the moon officially by 2030 with people, uh, Chinese tyonauts, obviously.

Um, and they have a a space program already. They have a space station, had several space stations. They have the ability to fly humans into space and to recover them. Um, and uh, and actually the last news we got about a month ago was that they're looking into ways to accelerate that schedule into 2029.

So, I picked a date in late 2029 and I thought that's uh, 1640 days away. It's about um, is that three and a half years or something from now. It's not that long.

Um, and one thing I can tell you for sure is that the Chinese space program managers fear the consequences of failure in a way that uh, US space program managers have not felt or feared for many a decade. What is are are are we should we be comping their efforts to NASA or SpaceX or both or some mix?

What is the Chinese what's the shape of the Chinese space program right now? Well, I mean, I don't I'm not an expert on the Chinese space program by any means. Um, but uh it's it's obvious from from the way they work that they're dead serious about it.

Uh they are in second place behind SpaceX when it comes to launching stuff into space and they haven't got reusability done yet. So, they're they're producing significantly more cores. Uh and then of course when they're done with them, they drop them on villages because they run things differently.

Um now, you know, I think that on this show people will understand what I mean when I say the light cone wants to be free. Uh the light cone is a place where where humanity needs to needs to expand and experience freedom and um and the reality is that uh laws of physics don't guarantee that freedom will succeed.

It it helps us. Freedom helps us perhaps but um the challenge we face I think is that is that NASA is the organization whose job it is to make sure that uh that we don't get a 1958 sputnick-l like surprise ever again. And uh and there are many many smart people at NASA working hard on this.

that their efforts are, you know, somewhat circumscribed and and challenged by kind of decades of accumulated craft and and and problems that um are kind of causing major major major problems within the within the organization and and for the US space program as a whole.

You I think SpaceX has done a really incredible job of upholding US interest in space. If it wasn't for SpaceX, we'd obviously be in a deep dark hole by now. Um but it's it's a lot to rest on the shoulders of just one company.

And I think this has been reinforced in the United States just last few days uh with you know people realizing that actually um you know the second place uh US space company or whatever is an awful long way behind SpaceX.

Uh it's not for a lack of trying and SpaceX is probably the number one place on Earth for training rocket engineers and and and nothing forces them to stay there. Many of them leave and start their own companies and good for them but uh they're still a long way behind. Yeah.

What uh why is the moon so important in your opinion? Um, there's arguments about security and defense and putting weapons on the moon. There's also resources. Like, what what are the top reasons why we should be going to the moon? I kind of just want to go because it seems fun. My son seems excited about it.

I want to go with him one day. Uh, but aside from we need to figure out if it's made of cheese or not. We do. We do. Yeah. Well, I mean, I don't think it's really a secret that that the moon is the second nicest place out of the Earth and the Moon. Um, it's a little bit like Antarctica or something.

It's not it's not a place that's got resources we really need. Um what it what it represents is a it's a symbol symbol of freedom.

It's a place that that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin uh first first tro on back in in 1969 and and uh and you know we came in peace for all mankind you know and I think that that you and I and and NASA and much of the western world sees the moon the same way and and the accords and the artist space treaty and so on.

I don't think that the generals in Beijing see the moon quite the same way. You know, and I might not be quite as hawkish as as some of your other guests here.

Um, but it does not help me sleep well at night thinking that if the Chinese have a have a durable and defendable presence on the moon with humans running around there and the United States does not, at some point they could say, well, you know, this outer space treaty is a nice idea, but no one who is alive had anything to do with writing it and at the end of the day we have nuclear weapons and this is ours.

And then what do you say, right? Like then they basically planted the flag and said, "No, the future of the light cone is going to be uh communism with Chinese characteristics forever. " Mhm. And uh that's that's not a situation, not a future I want.

It's not a fu, you know, it's not a future or a situation that my children can can live up to or participate in. It's not a future that's open to them.

They can they can, you know, hug their stuffy, you know, rocket to to sleep every night dreaming of a future where they get to explore the universe, but it's just not one that that will be protected despite the fact that that we spend in the United States 20 billion a year on NASA and and a whole bunch more on other space programs that are less publicized, which is, you know, just NASA's budget is twice the Manhattan Project's budget in inflationadjusted dollars.

It's not it's not a small amount of money. And yet, where's my moon base? Yeah, where's our moon base? Um, I hope the the the Chinese are are, you know, taking the proper steps to get Salana's permission to go to the moon. Considering they got to go through Mike Sal. They got to go through Mike Salana.

Um, what do you hope to see from the uh next NASA administrator now that Isaac men is out, which obviously a lot of people in our corner of the internet were very disappointed by, but uh I'm curious where where what you would like to see uh from them. Yeah.

So obviously NASA administrator serves at the pleasure of the president and it's his prerogative to to decide you know who wants to to serve there. NASA administrator is a super tough job. Might be the toughest job in government.

um because you know it's you have to balance this impossible set of requirements and now we've got this this budget process that's going on and there's no NASA administrator in the chair to be part of that conversation to be advocating on behalf of of you know which things are you know perhaps technically sensible or less sensible for reasons that Congress people cannot be expected to understand or even to take an interest in it's a very very esoteric and strange stuff and so you end up in a situation where in 3 months or 6 months or 18 months or something a new NASA administrator will be sitting in the chair with a budget they didn't have anything to do with with a bunch of programs that were designed by people for reasons that are, you know, long past their expiry date and um and have to make the best of what they can do.

And in the meantime, it is 1,639 days until China takes the moon. And this is a major major challenge. You know, I think it'll it's ultimately reflected extremely poorly on the Biden administration that they um that they put Senate Administrator Bill Nelson in there.

And he was unable to uh help NASA respond to the existential challenges that face it. Uh his his uh intentions no doubt were fine. Uh but his his actions and the results of his his work were um mixed at the best.

uh and and I don't think that uh Trump or anyone who supports him would want a situation like that for NASA looking ahead in four years and if if if China's on the moon in 2029 uh that'll be in the same year that that Trump leaves the White House. So that's um there's a very daunting challenge.

You know, this is this is really a little bit like Sputnik over again that um that we have a situation that that really challenges to our core, you know, and of course Jared Jared's a unique individual. Uh he really, you know, he he did he was not under any uh you know confusion there.

He knew that going into NASA was was a horrible job. Like his literally his job is there is to upset a lot of people uh and and get a bunch of programs that are in deep deep trouble turned around quickly.

Uh and it's going to involve, you know, a lot of people losing their jobs or getting new jobs have been moved or relocated or all kinds of stuff. Just nasty stuff. And the the bureaucracy that's entrenched there does not like to change. And I know people who have worked there.

I know people who have tried to change things and who have been rewarded for their efforts with constant harassment and even, you know, legal and extralegal kind of problems and so on in their lives, you know, in constant investigations and and all kinds of stuff, right?

Uh it's just it's a absolute hornets nest in many ways. And Jared knew that and he stepped up because he recognized the United States had given him everything and he wanted to give back. Um now, you know, I don't want to prejudice whoever else steps up.

I mean ultimately someone's going to have to take the job and I wish them the best and I will help them in any way I can but it is a tough tough job and uh and I think that frankly the number of people out there who have the skills to do something useful uh with NASA and really turn it around and fix the problems that we've got here and the inclination to actually to try and to to basically blow up their entire life for the rest of their life because that's what's going to result no matter how well you succeed is a very very small number.

It's a real challenge. Um, we have to wonder why is it that in a country of 340 million people, we only really have a handful that could plausibly go in there and and and solve these problems right now. And if we don't, China will take our future. Yeah.

Uh, talk to me about power generation on the moon and kind of like the buildout if we actually wind up getting there and and and and building like the launch capabilities to get up and back. What does the industrialization process of the moon looks like look like?

Like I know we're going to have to figure out a lot on the on the fly, but uh I looked at a company that that their it was probably a year and a half ago. Their pitch was uh we're going to build Chevron on the moon. Uh super super bright team that had actually run some pretty meaningful experiments.

I couldn't quite get there from an investment standpoint because I was like, yeah, there's so many things that need to happen, but I really hope they're, you know, successful. But yeah, break break it down for us. Well, I think step one is is just establish the ability to move stuff to and from the moon, right?

And once we have that, then we have the operational freedom to build a base of any size we want there, right? And that's that's a question for future voters and future presidents, I think. Um, but ultimately, I'd be quite happy to see something there that's a bit like the Antarctic program.

It could even be run by the NSF, right? NASA could be responsible for for setting it up and developing the infrastructure and NSF could run it like the Antarctic program. We send scientists up there because they'll go there voluntarily.

um you know it's ultimately there for strategic reasons and you could have 100 people or a thousand people and and you could fly you know chicots for like fly like cosmonauts fly fly Indian astronauts fly astronauts from Japan and the EU and Australia and everyone else and they get to go up there and they work in US moon base run by funded by the United States built by you know American sweat and American brilliance companies much like the ISS right uh a little bit like the ISS but maybe with a little bit more kind of down to earth in a way like actually dealing with rocks and and doing real science and stuff like that.

Yeah. Um, in terms of energy on the moon, there is one one way of getting energy on the moon that won't cost10 billion dollars to develop, and that's to set up large scale microwave beaming plants on the surface of the earth and beam the power up there. Really? Yeah.

The moon the moon always faces the same face towards the earth. So, so once you've got your your rectum panel up there set up, it it will always receive the power provided the power to be sent from Earth.

And of course, you could try and send up kind of some kind of nuclear power station or something, but nuclear power plants are extremely expensive to build even on the Earth, let alone on the moon.

So, I think if you just wanted to get power there quickly, the best way to do it is just to beam it up from What about just throwing out a ton of solar panels? That feels like that that was what I was teeing you up for. Yeah. Yeah, that's what I was teed up for.

Solar panels are great on the Earth because um you know, where people live, you never have a night that's longer than about 16 hours. Sure. um and um for for the vast majority of the world's population.

But on the moon, even in the in the parts of the South Pole, which are, you know, ostensibly peaks of eternal light, you can still have uh you know, pitch darkness for five or six days at a time in winter, which is um basically means like if you're flying your entire power system up from the Earth, which ultimately you would have to uh like 99.

9% of it by mass has to be batteries. And um that's that's an interesting question. You might be better off just flying over a starship with a bunch of spare fuel and a and a gas turbine generator. What about what about uh solar panel on one side of the moon? Solar panel on the direct opposite side of the moon.

Really long extension cord. Very long extension cord. I don't want to bore your I don't want to bore your your readers with discussion of passions law, but um Okay. Doesn't work. When you when you when you when you run the numbers, it it it's no it's no cheaper. It's not good. Okay.

So, yeah, give me the broad terraform update. How are things going? And uh uh how many solar panels do you have? where are we in the roll out of of uh solar power dominance across uh across America? Well, that's two separate questions. So, at Terraform, we're going great.

We're integrating our first Mark1 system, you know, over the summer right now. Um it's it's a machine that's designed to produce limitless quantities of carbon neutral, cheap synthetic natural gas from sunlight and air.

You can literally roll up roll out a solar panel in anyone's backyard and and hey, presto, you're on top of an oil well. It's a very neat trick. Uh really privileged to get to run this with my my friends here uh and with the confidence of our investors. Mhm.

Um, in terms of solar more generally, look, uh, the outcome is not in doubt. I think Jesse Pelton's been doing a great job on X recently. I've seen him. Yeah.

Talking about solar, look, at the end of the day, and this is actually another thing where I really hope that, uh, that Trump and and his team come in and help solve a problem that was kind of almost caused accidentally and hasn't been fixed since, uh, which is that, um, just by default, deploying solar arrays is unnecessarily complicated and expensive in the United States.

And really if we're we are in a in a geopolitical kind of struggle right now to see who gets the cheapest energy fastest and China is far ahead of us and they're able to produce finished parts for less than the cost of raw materials in the United States it helps that we're much richer than they are in China but at the same time the technology is the same.

The sun signs shines the same actually shines better shines better here. Why is it so difficult to roll out solar panels? It feels much easier than oh I don't want a nuclear power plant in my backyard. The windmills is going to chop up the birds.

There's like so many obvious uh problems with the other environmentalists environmentalist get upset about it understandably you know like um at the end of the day having the the power to say no is is addictive right say no not in my backyard even if it's just a solar panel that's making it power cheaper but actually the best land for solar in the United States is so hot that no one wanted to live there the United States government couldn't give it away death valley basically I'm talking about like 90% of Nevada is still federal land and so if you want to do if you want to do work there you have to kind of do it according the Fed's rules, which includes NEA, which includes like you have to do like four-year environmental impact statements that run to tens of thousands of pages to prove that like putting a solar panel out on a bunch of economically like worthless and biologically lifeless dirt won't harm the environment.

At the same time as we're subsidizing like 50 million acres of incredibly intense bioethanol corn production, it doesn't really make a whole lot of sense. Uh so I'm I'm not asking for that to go away.

What I'm asking is like can we get a categorical exemption for solar deployment with you know maybe some like you can put put some money in an escrow account to like take it down in 30 years if you decide you want to go back to being like empty desert.

Um and uh that would help a lot because then you wouldn't have to spend you know like it's this is the insane thing. It costs about uh just just the modules itself the fancy part that turns sunlight into power costs about 15 cents a watt and the cost of installing it in the United States about a dollar a watt.

So paying seven times the price of the unoptanium to import from China or whatever to install it which is insane, right?

Like if you talking about the same economics to a corn farmer or something like you are spending how many hundreds of thousands of dollars per acre to install something like how much does it cost to to sew corn? Like like 20 bucks an acre like almost nothing. That's wild. Talk to me about the supply chain.

Uh we hear a lot about the vast majority of solar panels being made in China. Is that a risk? Has it become a political football like everything else like the electric vehicle batteries etc.

Um, some companies, a Apple, Tesla, they've kind of figured it out mostly, gotten around a lot of the tariffs, but uh, what are you seeing in terms of the long-term supply chain uh, dynamics in solar? Yeah.

I mean, I think at the end of the day, there'll be countries that make their own solar and countries that don't, which won't really be countries, right? If you have energy sovereignty, you have sovereignty, and if you don't, you don't.

Um, and I think it's very encouraging to see both under, you know, even before the Biden administration, there was, uh, strong movements under the Trump one to tariff Chinese solar panels and start the scale up of solar manufacturing in the United States.

And we're seeing like more than a terowatt coming online in the coming years. That's great. At the same time, China is producing solar panels cheaper than anyone has ever even thought possible. Uh, and they're trying to dump them on our markets.

And my response to that is someone is if someone is predatorily dumping stuff on you, you should buy as much as you can because we can outbid the Chinese solar producers. Yeah. uh and we can just stack the solar panels up in a giant warehouse in Nevada and uh until we get around to deploying them.

But if your enemy is literally trying to give you a machine that prints out money, which is what a solar module is, you should just buy them as many of them as you can and uh and deploy them. Uh and and sure, you can you can prop up the US solar industry how you want.

It's it's good to have solar from all the world's factories coming here in the United States to make energy as cheap as possible here so we can make as many things as possible uh here. So we can we can do all the, you know, aluminum steels uh producing on shore. We can make as much fresh water as we possibly want.

can terraform Nevada, right? The parts that we don't put under solar panels, we can turn into something like Switzerland if we want to. All this is extremely achievable with cheap solar power. I like the sound of that. Yeah.

Uh, can you talk a little bit more about what it actually takes to produce a solar panel in America? It doesn't it doesn't seem as complicated as building an iPhone potentially, but maybe it is. It's much simpler. I don't think iPhones are are even that complicated. We have our intern here.

I don't know if he can see iPhone in America. He's making the first USA made iPhone uh this morning. Catch it, Tyler. How's it going, Tyler? Give us the update. I'm I'm now attaching the volume buttons. Got the front on. I've got the home button on. I'm feeling really good right now. Feeling really good.

Okay, we're making progress. Typically, once you once you're done with that assembly, uh TBPN intern, you need to go back to starting with rocks and then make the iPhone from rocks. I've got rocks in my backyard, so I'll give you some rocks. I'll mail them to you. And then you turn that into an iPhone.

Um that's the next that's level two. Next level two. Yeah. So sol modules start you start with a solar cell and then you laminate it between some glass with a aluminum extrusion around the outside. I mean that's the easy. We have factories that do that uh you know practically every state in this country right now.

Um if anything's the hard part. It's it's actually making the the metallological grade silicon. It's kind of an energy intensive refining process um that you can make the the cells themselves out of. Um but even that is like it's a well understood process. People have been doing it for years and years and years.

The real challenge is like it's like the same thing I wrote in that tweet about like China goes to sleep dreaming about the moon and they wake up angry about the fact they're not on the moon and like it's pretty clear that the NASA managers who are running the moon program are not obsessing over it in quite the same way because if they were we would have a moon base by now.

Um uh and it's the same problem here that like the United States domestic solar industry is not yet at the point where like they can taste 8 cents a watt solar modules and they're desperate to produce them, right? There's not that competition in China. There's 20 or 30 different companies.

Like ironically, capitalism is working in China to produce the cheapest solar panels ever. Um, and we can there's no reason we can't do that in the States, right? We're world experts at automation. We're world experts at at capital formation. We're world experts at building factories. Look at what Tesla's doing.

Tesla's outdated a completely automated. Yeah, it has to be. Yeah. The the white pill for American manufacturing is that thousands of people are learning how Tesla does it, how Starlink does it, etc. And we'll eventually go and decide, hey, maybe I should start a factory to make this thing, right?

Anyway, thank you so much for joining. Let's sit on the fence. This is fantastic. Build a factory. Build a factory. You heard it here first. Thank you so much for joining. We will talk to you soon, Casey. Great to have a great one. Uh, and the white pill on sales tax automation, of course, it's numeralhq. com.

Spend less than 5 minutes. sales tax compliance uh benchmark series A. Uh anyway, next up we have Patrick McGee, the author of Apple in China, a uh groundbreaking book