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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.
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
The moon should be treated the same way as Antarctica. There is a general agreement between all parties that set up a station there as to borders and the regulations.
There would be a foundation to organise limits and rules for mining and also apply penalties to governments that do adhere to the regulations.
But in the same sense, should we treat the moon as a unique habitat? Would it require wilderness protection?
I know I would like to go there and enjoy the serenity.
So much serenity.....
The only thing worth mining on the moon is ice, if it really truly exists at the poles. The reason it is worth mining ice is that it can be broken down into hydrogen and oxygen via electrolysis and then you've got fuel and oxidizer for a Mars mission located at the bottom of a shallow gravity well. It's been a while since I ran the numbers (I used to work for Boeing in an advanced projects group) but running a Mars mission with lunar fuel and oxidizer makes a BIG BIG BIG difference in the feasibility of it. Say you have a Mars ship in Earth or lunar orbit with empty tanks you've got to fill. From Earth you use the Shuttle, and it takes a full external tank and hundreds of millions of $$$ to get a Shuttle-cargo-bay-sized slug of liquids into your Mars ship tanks - many many shuttle missions and $$$ to fill them. It takes a LOT fewer pounds of fuel to lift the same hydrogen / oxygen from the surface of the moon to fill those same Mars ship tanks. It's the same as running a war - everybody wants to be on the tank that rolls into liberate the city, but in reality the war was won months before by the logistics and supply lines that made that final push possible. So remember, boys and girls - forget platinum group metals, the real lunar riches are its ICE...
What 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"
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!
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
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.
I think that's far too conservative of an estimate for fusion powered spacecraft (technologically, politically it could be never when a fusion powered spacecraft is sent to another planet). The most energy efficient AFAIK fusion reactors we're researching are colliding beam fusion systems (Tokamak). These work really well fusing Deuterium-Tritium but can be used with Deuterium-Helium and Hydrogen-Boron fuels as well. The problem with Deuterium-Helium fusion is the near complete lack of He-3 on the Earth's surface. We're much too hot with too little gravity to hold onto Helium for very long in any form and our atmosphere blocks most of the cosmic rays that form it. The Moon however would be a good source of it since there's nothing protecting the regolith from cosmic ray bombardment. With CBF reactors once you get stable fusion with one fuel source most of your work is done in getting to use other fuel sources. I think cutting your timetable in half would be a little better of an estimate.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
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.
You don't need the hydrogen and oxygen as an energy source - you need it as mass to throw out the back of your rocket to get your rocket to move forward. You can have a great source of power - solar or nuclear or whatever - and if you ain't got mass to throw out the back, you ain't going nowhere. Using electricity to split the water into gases is merely to prepare them to be a mass moving in the direction you want as a jet of steam.
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.
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
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.