Slashdot Mirror
Mining On The Moon
The Night Watchman writes "This article on Yahoo News outlines the latest plans in the works for a handful of private companies to begin lunar mining missions within the next 10 years."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
The only thing worth mining on the moon is ice, if it really truly exists at the poles. The reason it is worth mining ice is that it can be broken down into hydrogen and oxygen via electrolysis and then you've got fuel and oxidizer for a Mars mission located at the bottom of a shallow gravity well. It's been a while since I ran the numbers (I used to work for Boeing in an advanced projects group) but running a Mars mission with lunar fuel and oxidizer makes a BIG BIG BIG difference in the feasibility of it. Say you have a Mars ship in Earth or lunar orbit with empty tanks you've got to fill. From Earth you use the Shuttle, and it takes a full external tank and hundreds of millions of $$$ to get a Shuttle-cargo-bay-sized slug of liquids into your Mars ship tanks - many many shuttle missions and $$$ to fill them. It takes a LOT fewer pounds of fuel to lift the same hydrogen / oxygen from the surface of the moon to fill those same Mars ship tanks. It's the same as running a war - everybody wants to be on the tank that rolls into liberate the city, but in reality the war was won months before by the logistics and supply lines that made that final push possible. So remember, boys and girls - forget platinum group metals, the real lunar riches are its ICE...
What a totally moronic article: "it's not the technology that's the problem, it's the cost." Gee, who would have ever thought? If it costs us $20000/lb to get stuff in orbit, what the hell are we going to ship back to earth to make it worthwhile?
"The moon's got a lot of silicon and oxygen," Hey, news flash: its common name is "sand." We have a lot of it down on Earth too.
We can't even create automated mining facilities on Earth for fuck's sack, how are we going to get them working on the moon?
We've got big mineral deposits in Africa we don't exploit because it isn't economically feasible to build a mountain railroad. No problem, let's build a self-assembling, automated mining facility, ship it to the moon, have it build a railgun to launch processed resources back to us. Oh, and to be cost-effective, why not make it self-replicating? WTF? Why not just invent teleporter technology while you're at it?