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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."
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So now we are done killing our environment with strip mining, now we are gonna kill the moon's (I know, the moon has no environment.)
I hate sigs.
Getting Instrumentation & Electrical Techs up there might be a bit of a pain though.
It would be much easier if we just found some Horta and hired them to work for us. But in a vacuum it might be tough on them...
Who says who owns what when it comes to non-Earth bodies? I always thought the Moon was nobody's property/territory due to some international treaty. Mining the thing kinda implies someone does have claim/authority to it... nobody ever asked me if I want a big hole in our Moon.
Opportunity knocks. Karma hunts you down.
crash the whole thing in Wyoming, and mine the elements from the pile of rubbles?
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Score 3? For what? Being wrong, at length? - smirkleton
Ok, the Moon is obviously owned by no one. So is it first comes first serves? Could one company come along, buy up all the land and own the moon...? It could become the greatest advertising space of all time.
According to a FOX documentary NASA is a big conspiracy and we never landed on the moon.... of course its the most rediculous thing ive ever seen but just out of curiosity, how many people are pro-moon/anti-moon?
did we land on the moon?
"Think, It aint illegal.....yet" - George Clinton
I love little bits of useless info.
There's no point in being grown up if you can't be childish sometimes. -- Dr. Who
This brings up a good question... Who actually owns the Moon? Obviously it is outside of any country, but the US did land there first. Perhaps it will be a land with no laws, but what if someone decides to destroy it? I'm sure people would object to it's destruction, or damaging in any way, but who should be responsible to protect it, or decide the laws governing it?
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
sure, osmium sounds really cool, but is it really all that terribly useful in the grand scheme 'o things? I would think the potential for titanium and iron might be more compelling than the rare earth stuff (so would they now be rare-moon elements?)...
(and before someone starts quoting wonderous uses for osmium, remember, I am a chemist...)
Nope, not me, I must be someone else...
In practice, those with the money and technology to get there and mine it will be the owners.
As to who owns which bits, it's going to be an interesting matter to sort out. Where and how will the "Moon Wars" be fought?
jmp
Only problem is if you miss but given the distance it has to fall the chute could likely steer the payload clear of any problems.
It amazes me that so many allegedly "educated" people have fallen so quickly and so hard for a fraudulent fabrication of such laughable proportions. The very idea that a gigantic ball of rock happens to orbit our planet, showing itself in neat, four-week cycles -- with the same side facing us all the time -- is ludicrous. Furthermore, it is an insult to common sense and a damnable affront to intellectual honesty and integrity. That people actually believe it is evidence that the liberals have wrested the last vestiges of control of our public school system from decent, God-fearing Americans (as if any further evidence was needed! Daddy's Roommate? God Almighty!)
Documentaries such as Enemy of the State have accurately portrayed the elaborate, byzantine network of surveillance satellites that the liberals have sent into space to spy on law-abiding Americans. Equipped with technology developed by Handgun Control, Inc., these satellites have the ability to detect firearms from hundreds of kilometers up. That's right, neighbors .. the next time you're out in the backyard exercising your Second Amendment rights, the liberals will see it! These satellites are sensitive enough to tell the difference between a Colt .45 and a .38 Special! And when they detect you with a firearm, their computers cross-reference the address to figure out your name, and then an enormous database housed at Berkeley is updated with information about you.
Of course, this all works fine during the day, but what about at night? Even the liberals can't control the rotation of the Earth to prevent nightfall from setting in (only Joshua was able to ask for that particular favor!) That's where the "moon" comes in. Powered by nuclear reactors, the "moon" is nothing more than an enormous balloon, emitting trillions of candlepower of gun-revealing light. Piloted by key members of the liberal community, the "moon" is strategically moved across the country, pointing out those who dare to make use of their God-given rights at night!
Yes, I know this probably sounds paranoid and preposterous, but consider this. Despite what the revisionist historians tell you, there is no mention of the "moon" anywhere in literature or historical documents -- anywhere -- before 1950. That is when it was initially launched. When President Josef Kennedy, at the State of the Union address, proclaimed "We choose to go to the moon", he may as well have said "We choose to go to the weather balloon." The subsequent faking of a "moon" landing on national TV was the first step in a long history of the erosion of our constitutional rights by leftists in this country. No longer can we hide from our government when the sun goes down.
If guns kill people, then CmdrTaco's keyboard misspells words.
I think we should finish screwing up our own planet first before we go on and screw up others. Slow and steady does the job.
"I have not failed. I've simply found 10,000 ways that won't work." --Thomas Edison
if nothing else this might spur NASA into action. I believe that the moon is covered by international law in the same way that antartica is. should someone get there and start mining perhaps an international consortium will be tapped to monitor the mining, which could lead to a permanent outpost on the moon.
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That was about mining it.. there was, AFAIK, another one about which country the Moon belongs to (kinda like some islands belong to countries on the other side of the planet).
Opportunity knocks. Karma hunts you down.
These companies have no right to do this to the moon. The whole universe was not put here so that we could carefully destroy planets one at a time. This topic has not even been placed up for debate before people have started to plan the moon's destruction! The action of these companies is reckless, as we need to more carefully manage our natural resources. These companies are simply looking for money, but it is ridiculous to think they have any right to go up and start chopping at the moon.
On the other hand, efforts to colonize North America were often driven by (fruitless) attempts for money.
"I have not failed. I've simply found 10,000 ways that won't work." --Thomas Edison
Sure, when you put it that way it all seems so perfectly reasonable! :)
Shut up, be happy. The conveniences you demanded are now mandatory. -- Jello Biafra
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...
``If there was a layer of gold a foot thick floating over the earth at an altitude at which we could send up a shuttle to go up and collect, it wouldn't be worth doing it,''
Unfortunately, it's true. We still need a cheap, high efficiency delivery system before we can even think about profitability.
There is one interesting possibility, though. The "novelty" market. As the article points out, people are willing to pay $2200/mg for moon rock. I know I'd pay a decent amount. Would I pay more than the fragment's weight in gold? I don't know. But there are plenty of people that would. For the initial startups, which would be responsible for the R&D in to making "practical" missions (for materials rather than novelty,) practical, this may be a solution. Still, to make back $1.5 billion from 100 kilos of space rock, you need to sell the rock at $1.5 million/gram. Yeah. Right.
-- Minds are like parachutes... they work best when open.
I think they should store nuclear waste on the dark side of the moon so it can blow up and send inhabitants of Moon Base Alpha on cool space adventures.
--- -- - -
Give me LIBERTY, or give me a check.
I knew I'd read that before. It cracked me up the first time, well over a year ago.. (Seemed more like 2 years ago, but I could be wrong.) Anyway.
Some site Google found me
Here on Slashdot
The streets shall flow with the blood of the Guberminky.
Even if these idiots didn't accidentally deorbit the Moon after an overambitious blast, wouldn't the cumulative effect of gradual removal of mass from the moon (over time) end up affecting the Moon's orbit and the Earth's weather?
Indeed the equations of classical dynamics, worked out by physicists quite a while back, predict that reallocating mass from the Moon to the Earth would change their motion, both with respect to each other and with respect to the Sun. A reallocation of mass between these two bodies would affect things like the tides, wind patterns, and our climate in general -- probably unpredictably and potentially unfavorably.
Given that the so-called Laws of Physics could not be rewritten by even the most pro-corporate US government, doesn't this projected mining of the Moon sound like a terribly bad idea?
Aren't the costs of moving things around in space too much to make anything like this worthwhile? It costs millions of dollars to put a couple tons of junk into orbit. Wouldn't the cost of fuel be more than the value of anything we could get from the moon?
Until we have something like the space elevator, I just don't think this will happen.
One word.... LASERS.
Before some environmentalist moron comes up with some lame comment about saving nature and not touching space, let's enjoy this penultimate attempt to make money by exploiting natural resources which belong to nobody. Since moon is a dead space body, no pollution problem whatsoever, no local inhabitants to complain or nationalize after all the big infrastructure work has been done. Even governments are not interested, therefore won't interfere. An industrial dream.
-- javaDragon is an instance of JavaDragon.
Get your facts straight. Thats just a pure rip-off to the lyrics for Insane Clown Posse & Twiztids diss "Slim Anus" that was aimed towards Eminem and Dr. Dre. It was only supposed to be played on radio once but it got bootlegged so much that they decided to release it on a limited edition cd called Psychopathics From Outer Space. So now everybody knows what a fake you are, didnt you think anyone would notice?
Sure people would die, but gold would be raining down from the sky!
I remember seeing plots of moon land for sale on eBay about 1.5 years ago. These were plots of land as large as 500-1000 acres. I wonder when territorial rights disputes on the moon will start happening. This is an opportunity for people to start building more micronations, I would hope.
Did anyone check to see if Kraft Foods was one of the companies trying to hit pay-dirt on the moon?
Thank you for reading One Man's Opinion. No participation necessary. Offer void where deemed by law or PATRIOT Act.
Go to www.lunarembassy.com and you will see that he claimed rights to the moon and other celestial bodies in 1979 by writting a letter the the united nations, US and soviet union to claim said ownership unless there were any objections. They chose not to object and now he sells deeds to land on the moon and in space. Apparently he makes millions of dollars doing this.
Would we remove enough material to ever make a difference? I think not. More mass has been blasted from the moon from metor impacts than we will ever mine and take back to the Earth, has the loss of that mass affected the weather in any catastrophic way?
Sure maybe the mining companies have a lot of money, but consider this for a moment:
Just how are ordinary decent tree-hugging nature-loving separitist activists like myself expected to get up to the moon to protest?
And speaking of unfair, what is there to chain ourselves to up there?
And, also, how are we going to play Woodie Guthrie and smoke Mother Nature's loving green herb without atmosphere.
TOTALLY UNFAIR!
yes, it would affect the orbit. every time you throw a rock, you affect the direction and velocity of the earth ever so slightly.
the good thing is that it probably wo'nt matter much.
even the most fruitful mining attempts wouldn't remove 1% of the moon's mass. the change in mass between the earth and the moon would be so little that it's very likly not an issue.
Shouldnt we be actually trying to build houses so when the over flowing population of earth needs to go up there they can?
Land on the moon is more valuable than you think considering when people actually do move there you'll own land and will be able to charge insane prices
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
I saw somewhere that some crazy nut shot at the moon with a lazer and managed to cut "CHA" into it before being stopped by some blue spider, or some such. I hope the mining doesn't destroy the CHA, 'cause I haven't seen it yet.
~~~~~~
under-paid karma whore
Even if we had unlimited quantities of helium-3 sitting in tanks on Earth, we don't have the ability to do generate power with controlled fusion with it anyway. I think current guesses are that cost-effective fusion power plants, on Earth, using the deuterium-tritium reaction which is easier to do than D-He3, are at least a couple of decades away, so D-He3 space drives are probably at least 30-40 years away. It'd be nice to go to Mars before then.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
I thought the moon belonged to America?! I didn't see no Russian flag up there...wtf...its ours goddammit...add another star to the flag and lets appoint Gary Condit as the First Governor
hey hey hey, and then we can get the help of a big computer because we'll be the only ones who talk to them because bill gates the evil owner of the moon doesn't care about his computers and the friendly Linux-running computer (we'll call him "Mike") will help us overthrow the opressive regime and use nerds can live in peace on the moon! We'll even launch rocks covered in metal @ them and they won't be able to stop them mwahahahahahahah!!!! AND THEN, we can have all kinds of adventures in our p-suits and we'll drive around in the rolligons on the moon and mine rocks and Mike can help us market what we find to the computer illiterate masses of Earth! mwahahahahahaha!
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?
Transportation won't be the limiting factor. If you're not trying to shoot humans to the moon and back, you can use maglev to launch robots to the moon and return the goods to earth. You can accelerate equipment to much higher velocities with maglev because equipment can handle much higher g-loads than we can.
You shoot maglev-ramp-building robots to the moon, they build the return ramp on the moon and you've handled the transport cost issue. The maglev ramp on the moon is used to fling the ore back at us ala Heinlein's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress."
The biggest problem with mining the moon will be pollution. Just because the mining is happening on the moon won't mean we'll end up with no pollution here. The stuff is coming at us at a high speed and has to be decelerated without ablating into the atmosphere or cratering somewhere. If it ablates, you end up filling the atmosphere with ore dust. So somehow, the ore has to be gently brought back to earth.
The Artemis Project is more of a space club than a business (although it has some of the latter, and it is pretty successful compared with other clubs). Their web site contains a Data Book which was pretty good, but seems to now be members-only. Another good site is P.E.R.M.A.N.E.N.T. with lots of details about things like all the different minerals on the moon. Much of it is kind of long term (for example, mining applications which only make financial sense if you are using the minerals off-earth). And at the risk of immodesty I have pages on mining and novelties (with the former being more for the intrinsic value, such as platinum for its appearance or chemical properties, and the latter more having value by virtue of being from the moon). My pages are more focused on near-term applications (such as bring platinum group metals to earth). I try to include some numbers (such as prices of platinum, how much flooding the market would affect the price, how much it would cost to get materials back from an asteroid and stuff), so that you can tweaks the assumptions and see how that affects the finances.
Behold the power of cheese.
The robots will be taken over by a hostile alien virus, and I will have to go save them in my pyro gx, AGAIN.
How much is your data worth? Back it up now.
The moon and other pieces of our solar system serve as a sort of journal. They tell us about the life and adventures of the solar system. If we let corporations rip them apart then we will lose valuable data.
Now, one might argue that companies will be nice and give data back to the scientists who allowed them up there in the first place, but that is quite impossible. If you are a corporation you're goal is to make as much money as possible. If you start revealing scientific data about your sites (density, chemical make-up, etc.), then you let the competition in on where to find the "gold-mines."
In the end, I think that corporate mining of our solar features will serve as an impediment of science, rather than an opportunity to get more data. You may disagree, but when Lunar Mining Corporation (lunminco) sues a group of scientists for infringing on their trade secrets I get "told ya so" rights.
Martin Landau would not be amused!
If you believe
They put a mine on the moon
[mine on the moon]
</MUSIC>
I'm done with sigs. Sigs are lame.
...that, should the removal of debris from the moon cause any problems with its orbit or our environment, then we should be terribly concerned about the millions of pounds of cosmic dust that settles on the Earth (and the Moon) each year.
I think the fact we've discovered that Moon rocks are rich in titanium, aluminum and several other strategic minerals is one very good reason why people are looking forward to Moon mining.
Given the usefulness of aluminum and the high strength of titanium, I can guess within 100 years most of the Earth's supply of these two metals will come from the Moon, not the Earth.
I know the news is slow to filter through, but just thought I should mention that I, Sir Mudge Pinkerton-Bottomley, am the sovereign Emperor of the moon. Application forms for mining leases should be sought care of me at Slashdot.
Moon Composition*: .38 .73 .43
Compound Apollo II Basalt Apollo 14 Breccia Appollo 17 Regolith
SIO2 40.46 48.09 44.47
TiO2 10.41 1.51 2.84
Al2O3 10.08 16.72 18.93
FeO 19.22 9.53 10.29
MgO 7.01 10.18 9.95
CaO 11.54 10.67 12.29
Na2
*L. Haskin and P. Warren "Lunar Chemistry"
Notice that key biogenic substances including hydrogen, carbon, and nitrogen do not make up a segnifagent portion of moon rock. (~50ppm)
In addition the moon posses Helium-3 (10ppm) - an isotope otherwise nonexistent in the inner solar system. It is a key substance for magnetic fusion with the reaction D + He3 -> He4 + H1, which produces about 18MeV of energy (and does not produce the nutron bombardment of the D + T -> He4 + n reaction used in current experimental fusion devices). If fusion power generation becomes reliable in near future, He3 is worth at least $1 million per kilo at today's energy prices. Unfourtantly with the ~$10,000 per kilo launch price today, it would cost almost $5 billion to extract $1 millon of He3 and return the product to earch.
Until launch prices drop to about $100 per kilo, moon mining is pointless. Launch prices this low are possible, though it means working around the gridlock of the Lockheed-Boeing-JPL-NASA-Congress monster in the US (who's launch costs are ~$10000/kilo on a delta III and twice that on the shuttle).
**Most of this post is based on information from the book "Entering Space" by Robert Zubrin.
-Chris Howard
May the sacred call of the dogcow guide you down the path towards nerdvana. MOOF!
that was funny, seriously, funny.
Cloud City Digital: DVD Production at its cheapest/finest
If some mining company sets up shop there, we can whine all we want, but unless the US/Russia/China/UN/whoever can either a)stop the mining operation through force on the moon itself, or b)stop those in charge here on Earth... well, ownership suddenly amounts to squat.
Of course, for an Earth-run mining operation it should be easy enough to arrest those responsible, if we want to ignore the complete lack of laws in the matter.
What'll be more interesting is if someone manages to set up a self-sustaining lunar colony. Guess what? That person(s) would completely own the moon, carte blanche. Unless of course we were willing to nuke them off the surface of the moon, or fight some sort of inter-planetary war. Otherwise, seeing as there's nothing that can be done about it.. they own it by defauly. That's pretty much how countries exist on Earth, anyway.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
What makes them costly is extracting and refining them, but that is unlikely to be any cheaper on the moon if it involves space travel and rockets.
Holes and tunnels into the moon? Now the moon really will look like swiss cheese... and that's not gouda!
Sorry about the pun above... The real trick if mining companies want to make lunar mining worthwhile is to make the cost of sending stuff to and from space. Chemical rocket propulsion is so horribly inefficient for that purpose as to be impractical.
Now a real place that it would be worthwhile to do commercial mining if transporting stuff could be made easier would be Mercury; that planet's supposed to be full of the dense platinum group metals as it's closest to the center of the solar system (guess that would qualify as a "Rich" world in Master of Orion terms, unfortunately it also qualifies as a "Radiated" world).
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
Okay, so I read a "Mining On The Moon" headline and immediately, the C64 M.U.L.E. theme starts playing in my head. Just in case you're hearing the marching M.U.L.E. yourself... Here is one authentic-sounding remix, in its all its SID glory. (I'd mirror that link if I could -- sorry.)
Mining on Earth requires enriched deposits of whatever is being mined. That is, there's a lot of cobalt, nickel, iron, aluminum, magnesium, manganese, calcium, sodium and titanium, and most other elements already on the Earth, and are fairly common at that, they just aren't enriched enough to be worth the cost of mining.
On Earth deposits of economically viable ore minerals are frequently deposited by volcanism and/or by processes related to water. Since these processes do not presently operate on the moon, it seems likely that moon rocks will not be much more enriched in most elements than most (much more easily mined) terrestrial rocks. Aluminum, for example, is typically concentrated in ores by chemical weathering process which do not operate on the moon. Without free water, the moon could pretty mineralogically boring.
Consider the thousands of square miles of Eastern Washington and Oregon covered with huge basalt lava flows -- just as large areas of lunar highlands consists of thick basalt flows -- and ask how many people are out in Eastern Washington laying mining claims to dig up this rock? Unless this rock is enriched by some secondary process, despite all its aluminum, iron, etc., it's not worth much -- it's used mostly as crushed gravel for cheap roads. It's worth even less than a dump truck full of 8MB DIMMs leaving a Hynix factory.
As for asteroid enrichment of PGMs on the lunar surface, even this one known method of enrichment doesn't sound too promising, and the article admits as much.
As another poster commented, the most valuable mineral on the moon is almost certainly ice*, which could be converted to rocket fuel. After that, it might make more sense to mine the asteroids directly.
Ice could also be the source of fuel for a craft headed to Mars, where there could well be a more interesting mix of mineral resources. Mars has a more complex history of volcanism, as well as excellent evidence for an abundance of water in the fairly recent geologic past.
* ...yes, ice is a mineral.
My report was supposed to be seven minutes long...
If there's holmium on the moon, we should devote our vast technological resources to conquering the ocean's inky mysterious depths!
Yeah...so I'm bitter, Ok?
it's trying to say "first post." But the author is stupid and didn't compose it in a monospaced font.
"Any connection between your reality and mine is purely coincidental." -Slashdot
How about this one.
The moon's gravity is pretty minor compaired to Earth's. So we use a mechanized lunar base to create solar cells out of the silicon dioxide on the lunar crust and place them in protective cases. Then we use a mass driver or similar device to send them into Low Earth Orbit for use on space stations or other large projects. They could then also be brought back to earch during routine restocking missions to the ISS. This sort of think also might enable us to build space stations on the stable Lagrange points (which would facilitate getting people to a lunar or martian landing points).
In essence, I would see the real potential not for mere mining (who wants to pay billions of dollars for gravel anyway, or even Platinum for that matter) but rather for manufacturing centers.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
"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."
Excuse me? The energy you spend separating the hydrogen from the oxygen is slightly more than the energy you get combining them when you 'burn' the hydrogen. It's like saying we should make lots of rubber bands because we can stretch the rubber bands and then run our cars on them, or slingshot ourselves somewhere.
Whatever energy you use could just as easily go directly into your vessel. Using solar power to split the water? Put solar panels on your rocket, or use a solar sail. Using nuclear fission? You had to get the materials for that up to the moon in the first place, might as well put them on your mars-bound rocket.
There may be some source of energy in the moon, but it isn't going to be ice.
As C.E.O. Nwabudike Morgan has pointed out, there will come a day when most of our minerals are mined on Nessus Prime. This will have the ancillary benefit of placing less strain on Planet's native ecology.
"Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he deems himself your master."
I could be wrong here, but IIRC, the moon's gravity is what causes the oceans here on earth to have tides. And without tides, the oceans would stagnate, and life on earth would be impossable. So those of you who think it doesn't matter what we do to the moon better think again.
I love Kimmy!
If it is believed that the moon and Earth share a common origin, or that the earth had ejected material to form it, would it also not be safe to say that the rare earth metals, such as the sought after platinum would be rare moon metals as well? Would there be some reason to believe a sizable quantity may be found, or more easily located on the moon?
that the moon is a harsh mistress...
karma capped
Let the protesting begin!
Strip-mining will be the preferred and obvious method. In fact, casting debris off in any direction as a method of disposal will most certainly occur. The obvious results will be that the appearance of the moon will change. It will not take long for that to happen either.
The surface changes would end up being very geometric in the sense that it would likely be in shapes based in straight lines and regular curvatures. From an Earth's eye perspective, the moon would end up looking more like the "Death Star" instead of the celestial body of romantic inspiration if has been since the dawn of man.
ANY change to the moon's surface will be a change for the worse. The moon as it is in its present form has been an object of romance, wonder and mystery. It has been the inspiration for so much of our world's culture and development. It's literally a part of our humanity. Now people are preparing to exploit one of the most significant objects in human history for a few bucks??? No. We don't need the moon's resources to badly.
I think it should be prevented.
That was pretty funny... But the idea that Galileo is just revisionist history cooked up by "liberals" kinda stretched it for me. (I could put more work into making that one plausible, but I'm lazy...)
--Fesh
Kill -9 'em all, let root@localhost sort 'em out.
You mean it's this late into the topic, and someone has been asking on /. about who owns the moon, and the name David Delos Harriman hasn't come up, yet?
(acknowledgments to R.A.H.)
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
First, why would we mine the moon when Near Earth Asteroids are cheaper to get to and have a much greater abundance of useful stuff (As opposed to rock)? Just one 2km iron asteroid is supposed to have more ore than we have ever mined in the history of civilization. Others are thought to be almost all ice (ice + electricity = rocket fuel).
Second, space mining isn't going to be able to compete with Earth-based mining for a long time. Guess what, it doesn't need to. We currently spend vast sums of money launching intrinsically cheap rocket fuel and metal into space when all we need is already up there. To get a gallon of gas soft-landed on the moon is costs ~$40,001, ~$1 for the gas and $40,000 to get it there. This is utterly ridiculous. If you could get that gallon (Ok, not gas but pretend it's liquid hydrogen) for $20,000 by asteroid mining, you are already way, way in the black.
All this Moon mining crap is just looking for an excuse to go back. I want to go back too, but this is just poor economics and makes space mining seem like a pipe dream when it's almost practical today.
See Making Money in Space or just Google it for more.
How much mass would need to be stripped away from the Moon to accelerate its fall to the Earth?
we've been hearing about this stuff for ever. whenis it going to be implemented?
We seldom regret saying too little but often regret saying too much.
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?
Why wasn't this flagged as "Troll"?
Several automated mining projects have started up on Earth in the last couple of years. They're all working pretty well last I heard. I'm involved with a couple of them.
A few links off the top of my head:
Mine Automation at LKAB
Mining Automation Program
Automated Mining Systems, Inc. (disclaimer, I work there)
Also this Slashdot story about the topic.
True, getting something similar going on the moon would be exponentially harder (radiation hardening of electronics, fuel sources, etc.) but it IS being done here on Earth.
Should we become concerned about moving mass from one celestial body to the other? I haven't had a physics class in a while, but wouldn't moving stuff from the moon to the Earth change the gravitational relationship of both? I know that currently there won't be enough traffic to matter but later on...
Never trust a bald barber; he has no respect for your hair
The problem is that most of the world's supply of titanium is coming from the former Soviet Union. The geopolitical considerations of that is obvious, that's to be sure.
Indeed, that's the problem with a lot of rare-earth metals--they're all located in areas that have serious geopolitical problems (remember tantalum?).
Who knows, how do we know this won't start the moon moving away from the earth? how do we know this won't make it move towards the earth? i don' think getting hit by the moon is big on anyone's list.
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
The cost in 1960s dollars to return 1500 pounds of cargo was 340 million, or about a quarter of a million dollars per pound (in Y2K dollars, about 1.7B, and a bit over a million dollars/lb). Of course, if we did not use man-rated systems, and use lightweight robots instead, we'd save a lot of weight and costs.
/. flamefest, I looked up the weights of some typical mining machines and they are astounding.
But -- if we achieved hundred fold increases in pounds returned per dollar over 1960s figures by eliminating the man rated systems and using advanced techniques unavailable then, you are still talking $10,000 per pound, or about $685/troy ounce (at the price we paid for the Apollo missions more like 68K/troy oz). Aluminum and titanium are out of the question even with the optimistic hundred fold improvements. So is Gold, at current rates of about $275/troy oz, and platinum at about $440/troy oz.
As an optimist, you might think that if Pt doubled in price, and we could achieve hundred fold increases in monetary efficiency for retrieving it, then we could go to the moon to get it. This is true, but only if we could just go there and pick it up lying around. However, as the article points out, there is no volcanic activity to concentrate metals in veins, and no erosion to break it up into convenient nuggets to find. So, you're going to have to mine it, and you'd have to process a huge amount of material at that because you aren't going to find many rich veins.
This means mining machinery. During the last
A small crushing machine weighs over thirty english tons. Granted if you were to make a machine to be transported via spacecraft, you would do everything you could to make it lighter. However, we are talking about crushing rocks here; cleverly reinforced tinfoil and carbon fiber are not going to do the job. You'd also have to pack a fairly powerful nuclear reactor, since even this small machine requires well over a hundred kilowatts to operate. This means the reactor would have to be packed to survive launch accidents. Cassini's RTGs, for example, provide well less than a thousand watts when they are fresh. Some Russian designs for space flight produce 5-6KW, still an order of magnitude too small to run a small crusher. You would need much larger reactors, properly shielded and packaged to survive launch accidents.
Furthermore, this example machine is a small machine, and the lack of volcanically concentrated ore veins means you have to have a machine with a lot of capacity. It would be just barely feasible to put one of these small machines on the moon with a Saturn V (6.1 million pounds to deliver about 45 english tons of payload to lunar orbit).
I don't want to be a wet blanket here. The point is that mineral wealth does not seem to me at this time a sufficient reason to go to the moon (although these people may have found clever ways around these obvious objections, and all bets are off if we look outside the next twenty years or so). It seems to me at this time only commodities which are lighter and more precious than metals can justify the cost -- things like knowledge, and prestige.
If somebody was going to put a research station onto the moon to use its unique environmental properties (moderate gravity, hard vacuum in large quantities) I would be less skeptical. I'd be even less skeptical of a scheme to put super rich tourists on the moon, or if a single ultra wealthy individual like Bill Gates announced he was going to spend his fortune on a visit to a moon. Clearly it is technically feasible to go there and back, it is just not financially feasible to do it for ordinary kinds of massy commodities.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
1) Yes. If you compare the climate now to millions of years ago, there is a vast difference.
2) Wouldn't the gravity just bring back down anything that got knocked off?
Economically viable? Hard to say. Necessary? Yes, eventually. Legal? No, but then again, treaties with USA aren't worth the paper they're written on.
Environmentally friendly? CHRIST NO! Why bother, if you launch it from the moon? The moon (and the rest of space for that matter) is a dead pile of ashes, perfect playground for boys and the big toys. Space is the place where maniacs with giant guns and bombs can do some good!
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more, Or close the wall up with our American dead!
(from mr.show)
Look Out Moon, America's gonna getcha
Gonna go kaboom was nice to have metcha
Cause you don't mess around
With God's America!
Blowing up the moon fever has swept America!
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
As the earth rotates faster than the moon revolves, the moon's gravity tugging on the water (tides) and land itself transfers energey from the earth to the moon. The earth's rotation slows, the moon gains energey, pushing it farther away. The system will stabilize when the moon revolves around the earth at the same rate the earth rotates. Earth's day will be as long as the lunar month.
Already the moon has completed the first step of this -- the gravitational effects by the earth on the moon have caused the moon's rotation speed to match the moon's revoloution (lunar month).
I am for the complete Trantorization of Earth.
Actually, chemical propulsion is highly efficient. Rockets are the most efficient heat engines ever built. The problem is that launchers are expensive, but this is because they currently require standing armies of workers and/or they throw away expensive hardware. Propellant cost itself is down in the noise.
Neither titanium nor tantalum are rare-earth metals.
BTW, the main use of titanium is in paint. Titanium dioxide, when purified, is the white pigment of choice. Raw titanium ore costs just pennies per pound; we're not going to be mining that in space for use on Earth.
1. George Bull.
2. To those who say that moon mining is going to de-orbit the moon: I really don't think so. No more than Earth mining is going to de-orbit the Earth. The Moon is bigger than it looks; (it's not a whole lot smaller than Mars, actually. -Not that Mars is particularly big, but it's certainly not small enough to push out of orbit with our tiny human affairs and giant human egos.)
3. "Cha"
4. According to this website, moon-mining has already taken place.
Okay. That's enough to chew on. Get back to work, all of you.
-Fantastic Lad
Anyone else notice that so many things having to do with space-flight or fusion are always about 10 years away?
Only some of the site is members-only. Much of it is still free to all, as is the main Artemis discussion list, the Moon Society site and the space news pages thereon.
:)
:v)
If you've got a better idea on how to entice people into paying membership fees, maybe you could suggest it to them
Vik
Asteroids have a negligbly small gravity well, even compared to the moon's weak gravity. Some asteroids are so small that an astronaut would have to be careful not to jump too hard, lest he accelerate himself to escape velocity with leg-power alone. Clearly, this would be conducive to space mining profitability.
As I understand it, asteroids also have higher concentrations of valuable minerals than the moon.
While the first few mining machines would have to be manufactured on Earth, the output of those first machines should be directed towards manufacturing more mining machines in situ (at the asteroidal mining site). This will make for a long bootstrapping process -- and it would take many years to see a return on investment -- but it is necessary for the survival of our species. Earth's resources are finite, but space resources, effectively, are not.
The public must be educated about the need to undertake this economic transformation, which will involve some initial sacrifice, but will yield a long-term payoff of unimaginable scale.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
First, as the AC pointed out, the location is useful - sending stuff into orbit (to build things) from the moon is a heck of a lot cheaper. Plus, even if the quote is true, there's a difference between sending up a shuttle (burning a hell of a lot of fuel) each time, and shooting mined material down a gravity well. Ever read any Heinlein? He got this right 50 years ago...
I think you'll find that many industrial concerns would be very receptive to the idea of shipping tree-hugging nature-loving seperatists like yourself to the moon. ;)
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
Francis E. Deck would be proud.
1) Perhaps other things are responsible for that climate change. I'm sure more goes into determining what the climate is than the relative masses of the Earth and moon.
2) Probably, but much would get away (and maybe even fall to earth!)
Anyway, I think it's sensationalistic and stupid to say "we shouldn't mine on the moon because it might affect our climate!" We'd have to take and unreasonable amount of material to the Earth to affect the the moon's mass in an even measurable way, let alone see the climate change that this chicken little is whining about.
Where did you get these numbers from? Is this the cost of a moon mission and the amount of rocks we got back? Since returning lunar material in bulk was never a goal of the moon missions, I would find those kinds of numbers to be relatively meaningless. Kind of like weighing the seashells from a vacation to Hawaii and calculating cargo shipping costs to there based on the cost of the vacation.
Actually, the surface of the moon is already covered with lunar material that has been broken up for you: it's called "dust." Smashed up by millennia of impacts from meteors, asteroids, and the like. Look anywhere on the moon and you will find many tons of it. I'm not sure what the depth is, though, and it may vary.
Moreover, the astronauts did in fact find concentrations of minerals in the moon rocks they sampled, and this was found while moving at a five-minute-shopping-spree pace, mind you: their time on the moon was extremely valuable, and they were constantly hurrying to get everything done.
I'm very skeptical of the person from ASR making proclamations about the geological details of the moon. Experts get paid to voice opinions, but the truth is that we've literally only scratched the surface of the moon. We know some facts from the observations of the astronauts and the samples they brought back. But the astronauts didn't go everywhere, and they didn't get to concentrate on anything for very long. What we did find ruined a great many of the existing theories about the moon, and it seems likely that there are just as many bombshells up there remaining to be discovered. All we have right now are theories, based on a very incomplete sampling of facts.
One other big point you're missing is that the minerals and raw materials mined on the moon would have a far greater value in Earth orbit than they would on earth. In orbit, the $10,000 per pound you mentioned is ADDED to their value. How much would NASA pay for aluminum girders and panels that are already AT ISS? Sending them to Earth orbit from the moon is also far cheaper than returning them all the way to Earth.
There are also far less environmental problems with mining the moon. By any reasonable definition, the moon doesn't HAVE an environment to spoil. On the Earth, there are profound cleanup-related issues that are only now beginning to be reflected in the costs of things.
I will say that as far as the amount of legal objections you have to put up with goes, mining on the moon could be as bad as mining on Earth. I'm sure the far left will come up with some reason to sue endlessly.
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
. . .mining on the moon.
The costs were based on the total mission cost from a '67 contractor memo I googled off of NASA's web site (sorry, don't remember the exact search). It was a starting point for some very vague back of the envelope estimations, some of which were wildly optimistic, a few somewhat pessimistic. It tells me that we have to be about a thousand times more efficient (which may well be possible) to justify going there to pick up already processed material (which won't be waiting for us ;-).
Actually, the surface of the moon is already covered with lunar material that has been broken up for you: it's called "dust." Smashed up by millennia of impacts from meteors, asteroids, and the like. Look anywhere on the moon and you will find many tons of it. I'm not sure what the depth is, though, and it may vary.
However, you really have the same problem: you've got a huge amount of dust to process, and that takes very large machines and lots of energy to run them.
Moreover, the astronauts did in fact find concentrations of minerals in the moon rocks they sampled, and this was found while moving at a five-minute-shopping-spree pace, mind you: their time on the moon was extremely valuable, and they were constantly hurrying to get everything done.
Well, on earth, you find concentrations of valuable commodidites in various rocks; even in common seawater. However, most sources of valuable metals that are economically feasible to exploit have been conveniently concentrated into seams by geologic processes that do not exist on the moon. As you point out there may be concentrations of materials on the moon formed by other processes, we just don't know.
One other big point you're missing is that the minerals and raw materials mined on the moon would have a far greater value in Earth orbit than they would on earth. In orbit, the $10,000 per pound you mentioned is ADDED to their value. How much would NASA pay for aluminum girders and panels that are already AT ISS? Sending them to Earth orbit from the moon is also far cheaper than returning them all the way to Earth.
It's an interesting point, but I suspect that the cost of fabricating hardware is going to be much higher on the moon than the cost of launching earthmade hardware, until the initial cost of the lunar facilities has been amortized over LOTS of orbital projects. In other words, to help build a relatively small project in Earth orbit, you'd have to build a much larger and more complex project on the moon first -- it just isn't an immediate help. However, if you were building a VERY large orbital structure or a large number of structures then lunar or asteroid mining might be a sensible option to pursue.
I will say that as far as the amount of legal objections you have to put up with goes, mining on the moon could be as bad as mining on Earth. I'm sure the far left will come up with some reason to sue endlessly.
Left-bashing aside, I think you overestimate the mining company's political clout. They can pretty much come in, liquidate an area, take their profits and disband before they can be held to account for any damage. On the other hand, getting the amount of nuclear fuel to the moon you'd need to power a major mining operation would be a huge political and legal mess.
In any case, it's not that I don't want it to happen; I just think its very unlikely.
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No offense, but it seems to me your numbers are at best somewhat suspect. : (
Wrong, since the dust is already ground up finely, most of the work is already done. The next stage might be to sift, maybe separate magnetically, and then to heat up batches of the dust and melt out the metals. Not a lot of machinery needed. And, you have lots of free solar energy to work with, assuming you base near the poles, so that you can gather solar energy all the time. Particularly good when you just need to melt stuff: you can focus the sun on it using big mylar mirrors.
As I pointed out before, mankind has spent a total of, what, a week and a half on the moon, in scattered areas, getting at best an initial sampling of data. We don't KNOW whether minerals are concentrated anywhere on the moon or not. Detailed surveys have not been done yet.
You suspect, but do you have numbers?
Fabricating parts remotely is getting very easy to do, if you use 3D printing/sintering technology. They're used in rapid prototyping now. They can literally print out a metal part one layer at a time, with very good tolerances. This is a machine the size of an office photocopier. Sending one to the moon would be very feasible. They require metallic powder to work with, which is coincidentally what you might expect to get out of your dust-mining operations.
Building electronics would be more difficult, but you would have lots of good clean vacuum and power, and raw materials.
I am sure, though, that there would be dividing line at which it would be cheaper to ship some components from Earth than manufacture them locally. If it's only some parts, though, and they're electronics and gaskets, you could carry lots of them for not too much weight.
Would it actually be commercially feasible? I honestly don't know. I admit I want to see it tried, though, because I'm a hopeless space fanatic. One thing is certain: it IS getting easier all the time.
Firstly, most of your power could be solar, if you're close enough to the poles to have power plants in sunlight all the time. Secondly, one of the major promising finds on the moon is large amounts of Helium-3 in the lunar dust and everywhere else, which may prove to be an excellent nuclear fuel. There is still a lot of research on fusion power that needs to be done on that, I admit, and there is a possiblity that it might not come to fruition in our lifetimes, but it is promising.
Let me say I respect the fact that you're trying to stick to facts. But, there is a lot of work that has been done on this subject, much of which is very encouraging. I'm sorry I don't have links at hand, but you might check in on the sci.space newsgroups to find more detailed info.
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
Pollution?! From what? Combustion engines? There's NO atmosphere!