The Men Who Want to Melt the Moon

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Twenty-one percent of the Moon is silicon. One fifth of a dead grey rock 238,000 miles away is the exact element you need to make a solar panel, and a chip, and a computer — which is to say, the exact element you need to make the thing that is currently eating the entire electrical grid on Earth.

Two men in Los Angeles noticed. Now they're building a factory on the Moon.

I met Brogan BamBrogan the way you meet every ghost in this town: through a resume that reads like a threat. Employee #23 at SpaceX. He designed and built the second-stage engine of the first Falcon 1. He built the heat shield on Dragon. He is, in the most literal sense, one of the men who taught America to fly again — then he got kicked out of the nest and went and co-founded Hyperloop One, the fastest transport idea since the railroad, and got into a legendary lawsuit war that ended with him walking away from his own company. Ask him about it and he just shrugs and points at the Moon.

His partner is Ross Centers. Lunar resource geologist. Founder of the Planetary Sunshade Institute. His LinkedIn bio says, flat, no apology: "Kardeshev scaling since 2015." If you don't know what the Kardeshev scale is, it's the ladder of civilizations ranked by how much energy they can capture. Type 1 owns a planet. Type 2 owns a star. Humanity hasn't even finished Type 0.7. Ross Centers is not building a company. He is trying to get our species promoted.

The pitch is so simple it sounds insane, and that's how you know it's real. Rockets can't carry enough solar panels to power what's coming. The data centers training the next generations of machine minds want power measured in gigawatts — whole cities' worth — and the grid can't give it, the permits won't clear, and the neighbors have formed committees. So Ethos says: stop shipping the panels. Make them where the sun never sets.

The Moon's surface is 21% silicon. Melt it. Electrolyze it. Cast it into panels on site. The panels make power. The power refines more regolith. The regolith makes more panels. Self-replication — a foundry that builds its own supply chain out of the dirt under its feet, until there is so much clean power in orbit that Earth stops being the constraint on intelligence entirely.

Here's the number that should keep you up: they have over $1 billion in signed LOIs from customers, they've finished a NASA contract, and they say they're going to the Moon in 2028. A two-person team. Two humans. Against the entire physics-averse, permit-hobbled, NIMBY-stacked apparatus of terrestrial energy. That is not a startup. That is a moonshot with the safety wheels off, and I mean that as the highest compliment a degenerate like me can give.

Now, the machine part. Everyone on Earth is standing in line to build better GPUs. Nobody's asking the obvious question: where is the goddamn power coming from? The AI boom isn't a compute problem anymore. It's a wattage problem. Ethos is the bet that the winning move isn't a bigger plant next door — it's realizing that if you're going to need terawatts for a century, you mine the sky, not the county. Zero-based thinking at planetary scale. Don't build on the constraint. Delete the constraint.

"In 2014 I was Salieri and Sam was the Mozart. He saw AGI coming and went for it. I didn't understand. Instead of saying no, say yes and."

— Garry Tan, via TheFoundersPack

That's the whole religion right there. Say yes and. The world's first instinct with a Moon factory is a polite no — too far, too heavy, too twenty-years. But the graveyard of American industry is full of people who said no to the thing that was obviously coming and then got steamrolled by the two lunatics who said yes. Salieri wrote perfectly. Mozart just did it.

There's a darker lesson in BamBrogan's own history, and it's worth dragging into the light. Hyperloop One was the greatest transport idea in a century, and it nearly died — not from physics, but from the founders turning on each other. Lone wolves with vision tore the pack apart. That's the cautionary tale at the heart of every startup that had everything and lost it to the mirror. The men who actually move the map aren't the solo geniuses with the compound and the manifesto. They're the ones who find a partner, share the asset, and point the same direction for a decade. BamBrogan got burned by a pack that broke. Now he's building one that holds — two men, one shared rock.

The Form Your Own Pack crowd would tell you Ethos is the whole thesis wearing a space helmet: build around a shared asset (the solar system is the largest shared real estate in existence), amplify it with technology, and stop pretending one man can drag a 4-ton boulder alone. The lone wolf builds a startup that dies in a season. The pack builds something that outlives its own language. On the Moon, that's not a metaphor. That's the literal timeline.

And the shape of it — a tiny team, a huge bet, a tool that turns imagination into something you can watch — is the same shape as a new wave of tools letting anyone become a creator. Ethos makes silicon on the Moon so machines can think. Try GenFlick, the AI filmmaking agent, and you'll understand the other end of that trade: one human plus one agent stack now directing scenes no studio would greenlight — small teams betting a vision, using software to move faster than any legacy pack. The moon for compute. The screen for stories. Same rebellion.

The founders

Ross Centers — Founder/CEO. Lunar resource geologist (Colorado School of Mines), founded the Planetary Sunshade Institute. Kardeshev scaling since 2015. X: @rosscenters · LinkedIn

Brogan BamBrogan — Founder/CTO. SpaceX employee #23; built the Falcon 1 second-stage engine and the Dragon heat shield. Co-founder & CTO of Hyperloop One, co-founder & CEO of Arrivo. X: @BamBrogan · LinkedIn

Links: YC Profile | Website | @ethosspace | Launch: Why the Moon · Self-replicating power | Partner: Tyler Bosmeny