How Lunar Resources Will Power Space Exploration | ISRU, Artemis & Moon Missions

Susan Wise: Welcome to Stars Launch Pod, Space Technology and Research Sciences, brought to you by StarSciences.org, where we connect, collaborate, and accelerate. I’m your host, Susan Wise, and joining us is Dallas Bienhoff. He is currently the Space Systems Architect at OffWorld Incorporated, where he is responsible for ensuring their space concepts have commonality, are synergistic, and are modular—whether they are surface or free-flying systems. He also leads their cislunar transportation development efforts.

Mr. Bienhoff also led the Moon Village Association’s Lunar Economics and Commercial Working Groups, the Earth-to-Moon Transportation Market Team, and was co-chair for the AIAA Cislunar Ecosystem Task Force’s Enterprise Architecture Working Group. You are a very busy person.

Dallas Bienhoff: Yeah.

Susan Wise: It keeps me out of trouble. Okay, you’ve got a lot going on. It’s so nice to have you on here, Dallas. I’m looking forward to visiting with you. When it comes to the space industry, things are pretty hot right now—pretty exciting stuff happening—and we’d like to know what you are working on to help further the space industry. What’s going on?

Dallas Bienhoff: So we’ve got a couple of things happening. We’re supporting a contract on how to use ISRU—in-situ resource utilization—on the Moon to enhance the capabilities of surface habitats. We’re doing that for a prime contractor, and we’re just about wrapping that study up.

Susan Wise: It’s exciting because that’s happening. That’s going to be happening.

Dallas Bienhoff: And then the other thing we’re in the middle of is our preliminary design. We just started for an OffWorld Prospector One—our OffWorld Prospector One mission—which is a large vehicle…

Susan Wise: Mm-hmm.

Dallas Bienhoff: …with prospecting instruments and tools to find icy regolith in permanently shadowed regions on the Moon. It has subsystems for extracting oxygen from dry regolith, for extracting water from icy regolith, and then electrolyzing that water to produce oxygen and hydrogen as a demonstration of what we need to do to use those resources to live on the Moon and to refuel reusable vehicles departing the Moon.

Susan Wise: Wow, that’s fantastic. That’s definitely a need if we’re going to be living there for any amount of time. Wow, that’s exciting. So that is in the final stages, or where are you at with that?

Dallas Bienhoff: We’re just starting the preliminary design.

Susan Wise: Wow.

Dallas Bienhoff: We’ve got over 20 participants on board with us that we’ve talked to and have laid out how that fits on our vehicle. We’ve had discussions with launch providers, but we don’t have a launch contract yet. So we’re at least three years away because of the launch integration process.

Susan Wise: Okay. I understand that.

Dallas Bienhoff: Don’t forget money.

Susan Wise: And money—funding. There’s always funding.

Dallas Bienhoff: Gotta have money.

Susan Wise: Our middle name, right? What was one of your biggest “aha” moments that you’d like to share with us?

Dallas Bienhoff: I think I’ll go back to the Constellation program. After the Vision for Space Exploration, we did a study on how to implement the vision. This is around the 2004 time period. NASA had devised a plan to send a lander on top of a large rocket—like the SLS, but different—called Ares V. They were able to land about 18 tons on the surface of the Moon: the lander vehicle, the ascent vehicle, the people, and the equipment.

We looked at propellant depots and refueling that system in Earth orbit before going to the Moon because Mike Griffin, the then–NASA Administrator, had said, “If it were there, we would use it—but it has to be commercial.” So we looked at that.

Mm-hmm.

And you could take the same systems, refuel them in Earth orbit, send them to the Moon, and land 51 tons—a 33-ton increase, almost a factor of three.

Susan Wise: Wow.

Dallas Bienhoff: And that was a game changer. Also, at the same time, SpaceX was just getting started. They hadn’t flown yet, but they’d posted prices for their launches. They had a Falcon 5, a Falcon 1, a Falcon 9. And based on what Mike Griffin said the value of propellant was for them in orbit, and what SpaceX was offering to launch things to orbit, we thought a commercial propellant depot would be viable. But that never went anywhere.

Then “depots” became a bad word in the NASA community because they felt it threatened the SLS—or Constellation at the time, the Ares V. So they didn’t want to talk about depots.

Susan Wise: Okay.

Dallas Bienhoff: That was a big “aha” moment.

Susan Wise: During all your different explorations, I’m sure you’ve had challenges along the way. What has been one of your biggest challenges, and how did you overcome it?

Dallas Bienhoff: I think I’d like to say it’s fighting institutional inertia—based on that previous story—and personal inertia. You know, we all have things we do the way we do them because we’ve always done them that way. And that’s really embedded in a low-risk activity like NASA programs. They really don’t want to fail. Missions are costly.

Susan Wise: Mm-hmm.

Dallas Bienhoff: And using propellant depots and refueling in space, and using LOX–hydrogen instead of LOX–RP (rocket propellant) or LOX–methane, was such a hard hurdle for people to overcome in terms of their thinking. And I really didn’t overcome it because I didn’t have the money to do it. I promoted it for five years at my old company—a reasonable architecture that did that. But without the money, you can’t show that it will work.

Susan Wise: Why do you think it was such a hard hurdle to overcome in their thinking? Why?

Dallas Bienhoff: Because it threatened the way they wanted to do things. It threatened—

Susan Wise: Okay, change.

Dallas Bienhoff: —the big launch vehicle. “We need to have a big launch vehicle. A mission in one launch.” Well, Artemis is never going to be done in one launch, as we know today.

I didn’t overcome it, but the industry has overcome it—because it has to be done in order to have a sustainable presence on the Moon. Artemis, with SLS getting astronauts to the lunar vicinity at the Gateway…

Susan Wise: Mm-hmm.

Dallas Bienhoff: …it takes Starship or Blue Origin’s Blue Moon to get us down to the surface. And to be reusable, they have to be refueled at the Gateway. To get propellant to the Gateway, the carriers have to be refueled in Earth orbit because it takes so much propellant.

So industry has finally caught up with what—more than me—felt was a better way to do things. There were others who promoted this idea as well. And it put stress on our jobs.

Susan Wise: Mm-hmm. I’m sure. Do you have any advice you’d like to share with our listeners?

Dallas Bienhoff: It’s a little cliché, but find your passion and follow it as a career. I really have played every day since I started working—if you want to call it that.

Susan Wise: As they say, you’ll never work a day in your life if that’s what you do. Yeah.

Dallas Bienhoff: I love what I do. I did what I do for five years on my own without income other than retirement. Thank God for pensions. You stay involved, you do it because you love it, you don’t do it because you have to. It’s not that you’re doing something to look forward to the future—you’re doing something to create the future.

True. With the government shutdown, it kind of put the brakes on things for a little bit with NASA, but now things are back open and moving along. Artemis II—any thoughts on that?

Artemis II is slated to happen in April of ’26; it might happen as early as February. I’m concerned because there’s still an issue—I don’t know if it’s understood—about the heat shield on the return of Artemis I. There were chunks that came out of the heat shield on its return to Earth. I don’t know… the last I’ve read, NASA still didn’t understand why.

Susan Wise: Well, you need to understand why so it doesn’t happen again.

Dallas Bienhoff: So I don’t know. I don’t know if they’ve solved that. Artemis II is really an important mission before Artemis III. It’s kind of a time filler schedule-wise, but we’ll see. I hope it’s successful—even with issues.

Susan Wise: Mm-hmm.

Dallas Bienhoff: Look at what happened with the Boeing Starliner and its issues getting to station. NASA didn’t use it to bring the astronauts home—they flew it home empty. Just last week, the Chinese crew vehicle was hit by a micrometeor. They came home on the vehicle that brought the replacement crew up, and China is going to send up a replacement vehicle. So there’s always a way to get home.

That’s not a viable solution for going to the Moon and back for Artemis II. You can’t send up a replacement vehicle.

Susan Wise: That is something to consider and think about. Before we wrap up, I want to know—do you have a passion project? I know you talk about this being your passion, but maybe any other passion project, past or present, that you’d like to talk about?

Dallas Bienhoff: I really want to get us off the planet. So how do we do that? We need to be able to use the resources that are there to minimize the logistics flow that has to follow us. So I’m doing my passion project—I’m helping us move humanity off the planet. Producing resources, finding resources, determining if they’re reserves, showing that we can do that, and reducing the cost of going and staying.

Alright. Dallas, just one more quick question. Do you have any thoughts on going to Mars? I know it’s a long way off and—

We should go!

Susan Wise: A lot has to happen.

Dallas Bienhoff: We should go. And I applaud Elon Musk for that being his vision—putting millions out there. He’s building a rocket factory like a car assembly line. I just read he’s talking about three Starships a day—a thousand a year—and sending them to Mars. I would love to retire on Mars, just like Elon. I would go, given the opportunity. And there are many people who want to go. I think we owe it to ourselves and humanity to find out if we can—and the only way to find out…

Susan Wise: Mm-hmm.

Dallas Bienhoff: …is to try. We need to go. We need to go not only to the Moon and Mars but throughout the solar system.

Susan Wise: Agreed. Agreed.

Dallas Bienhoff: But better propulsion would help us.

Susan Wise: Well, I’m so glad for the work that you guys are doing there and I look forward to all the new things coming your way. I’d love to visit with you again if that’s okay—get an update.

Dallas Bienhoff: That’s fine. Anytime.

Susan Wise: All right. Dallas Bienhoff, thank you so much for sharing your story with us today. We really appreciate you being here.

Dallas Bienhoff: You’re welcome, Susan. Have a great day.

Susan Wise: Be sure to join us where we connect, collaborate, and accelerate. Join StarSciences.org—you can get a free one-year membership. Just put in the promo code Friends321. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a review and subscribe.

Until next time, keep looking up.