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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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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.
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Score 3? For what? Being wrong, at length? - smirkleton
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
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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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.
What exactly are they "destroying"? Rocks? A dust layer? Undistinguished landscapes?
... jeez... come on! Engage that brain!
There's no life on the moon. None. Not even algae to get upset about dying. The only thing that even remotely affects life is the appearance of the moon, specifically the aldebo, and mining is unlikely to change THAT for a long time.
The universe routinely "destroys" entire galaxies for no (known) good reason. Who cares if we pull some stuff out of the moon?
*snort* "destroy the moon"
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.
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.
Sure people would die, but gold would be raining down from the sky!
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!
The whole universe was not put here so that we could carefully destroy planets one at a time.
Earth First!
We'll mine the other planets later!
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
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
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?)
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?
The whole universe was not put here so that we could carefully destroy planets one at a time.
Let's clarify: The universe does not exist for a reason. It simply exists.
We also have no intrinsic relationship with the universe, other than the fact that we are in it: it was here long before us and will mostly likely be here long after we're gone.
(I say "mostly likely" because I'm confident but not positive that we -- humanity -- are never going away either, but people call me arrogant about this)
The universe was not "put here" by anyone or for anyone. And even if it were, there is no way to know who did it or to what end. So stop being a dumass with your extra-terrestrial environmental alarmism.
Now, let's get one defintion straight. In a non-judgmental (non-"workers-of-the-world-unite") definition, exploit means, simply: To employ to the greatest possible advantage
I think that's exactly what we should do with the universe, go up there exploit the resources to our greatest advantage, bring stuff back here to improve the human lot, and repeat. That's what we do: we manipulate our enviroment to make our live's better That's why we have a gamecube and don't live in caves. We do everything we can to make our lives better.
We often disagree on what "better" is -- and that's why we have Amish people who like things the way they were 200 years ago. That's fine. Go build a barn. But stay the fuck out of the way of the rest of us.
We're not perfect. We screw things up. But, all in all, each generation is better off than the one before it. We live longer, we're healthier, we work less, etc. That's what we do.
The universe is an infinitely big place. Remember, the Milky Way Galaxy could blink out of existence and the universe wouldn't bat an eye. We are not cosmic park rangers.
So please pull your head out of your ass and get with the program: We have a lot of work to do.
It'll probably be a centuries before we get out of this rinky-dink solar system. We've got to get busy putting people on the moon, on mars, on io, on europa, on venus. We've got asteroids to turn into space stations.
And don't be a pussy about limited resources. Eventually, our sun will go red giant and fry all the inner planets to a crisp. That means all these precious resources have a built-in shelf-life already, no matter what we do.
By then, we had better be somewhere else. If we have to suck all the gas out of Jupiter to give us the juice to do that, then so be it.
Once we get off this puny planet, that's the scale of things. Hell, that's the beginning of the scales of things. The universe is infinite!
Note: I could go on. I can be anti-corporate also. I didn't say *how* we should do this, only that we *should* -- now. And that business interests in and of themselves are not evil.
Software Wars
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.
Heh.
1.) The moon is not a planet
2.) The universe was not "put here."
Natural resources are there to be used. Since there is nothing on the moon to destroy, perhaps you should worry about earth's rainforests instead.
-Legion
If you believe
They put a mine on the moon
[mine on the moon]
</MUSIC>
I'm done with sigs. Sigs are lame.
Those who believe that we never did land on the moon are a bunch of dipwads.. all of those conspiracy theories have been debunked, and the reasoning is on plenty sites out on the web.
There was another show sometime after the FOX special that also went over each of the points brought up in the show.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
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.
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!
To find out, take the number of Americans who live in trailer parks with a cross-section of those who think that Vince McMahon is god. That's your anti-moon people.
The rest of humanity (or at least those capable of high school physics) would be the pro-moon people.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
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.
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.)
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?
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.
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.
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.
isn't that a bit like saying, take the number of Americans who live in Chicago with a cross-section of those who live in Illinois?
-samburn the computers. go back to the abacus.
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?).
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.
Do you have any idea how fucking insignificant "millions of tons" is? The mass of the Earth and the Moon are measured in sextillions of tons! 6 sextillion, 587 quintillion tons to be precise. "One million tons" is less then one trillionth of a percent, and it would take a lot of hard work just to move that much!
Do the math on the energy requirements to move one billion tons of mass from the Moon to the Earth. Then compare to the explosion of an atomic bomb. You will quickly realize there is no way in hell we're moving gravitationally significant pieces of the moon onto the earth. Instead, we'll move us to the moon, and stay there.
You have an amazingly naive view of the capabilities of mankind and the capabilities of the universe. If mere millions of tons could harm us, then they would have, because that much stuff falls into the Earth all the time!
This kind of post epitomizes why I can't call myself an environmentalist, because too many of them simply shut off their brain and turn on their whine machines. By the time we possibly could change the moon, we will not need to. There are easier ways to do just about anything that advanced a species could want to do.
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
The point of lunar mining isn't so much to get refined metals back to Earth, but to get them into space. It may be more economically feasible (in the long term) to refine low-grade ore on the moon and launch it into orbit than it would be to refine high-grade ore on earth and launch it into orbit. The main thing that makes the moon attractive is it's low gravity -- it is a natural staging point for further space exploration. Lunar settlement and industry seems to be a prerequsite for manned exploration to other planets.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
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.
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.
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.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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.