Slashdot Mirror
Moon Mining Gets a Closer Look
happylucky writes "There are many obstacles to creating a space colony on the moon, primarily food, water, and oxygen. Since it is so expensive to bring supplies from the earth, some scientists have suggested that we mine the moon. In an article in the Toronto Star, Dale Boucher suggests the best way to do this would be to develop a mining colony. To that end, the Sudbury-based Northern Center for Advanced Technology has linked Canada's mining industry with some of the top minds on space.Mining the moon was considered earlier this month at the Planetary and Terrestrial Mining Sciences Symposium which attracted some 100 delegates, including experts from the Canadian Space Agency, NASA and the European Space Agency. There are other hurdles of course that need to be figured out. The moon's gravity is one sixth that on Earth. New research, however, may lead to a solution to this problem as well. It may be possible to develop a sticky compound that can be adjusted by UV light to help adhere boots and objects to the floor."
Does the Canada Arm ring a bell?
What about the ISS Canada Arm?
Tides are a result of the gravitational pull of the moon. Gravity is directly proportional to mass. To alter the gravitational pull of the moon by one hundredth of a percent you'd have to remove a hundredth of a percent of its mass. Thats 7.36 * 10^18 kg, or 7.36 * 10^15 metric tonnes*. Thats, lets see, substantially more than a million times the combined weight of every human on the planet. The space shuttle has a payload of 22 metric tonnes (/flex). Supposing we were to send one shuttle to the moon every second, it would take more than ten million years to move that much mass.
There is no reason to mine the moon, and there are plenty of good reasons not to, but "Oh no the tides will be thrown out of whack" is not one of them.
* Incidentally: try Googling "mass of the moon". Freaky, isn't it.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Coincidentally, just a few minutes ago I submitted a slashdot story about a telerobotic construction challenge which NASA is funding, which could spawn technologies which would be quite useful for a lunar mining facility. In case the submission gets rejected, here's the text of it (hopefully my posting it here doesn't somehow lead to an auto-rejection):
The non-profit Spaceward Foundation has released a rules draft for a telerobotic construction competition. Competitors will have 24 hours to use their robots to construct a water-tight pipeline at least 25m long through Mars-like terrain, with a control latency of 20 minutes. The foundation is seeking feedback on the rules draft until July 15, as well as ideas for contest names and logos. NASA will provide $250K in prize money to competition winners, as part of their Centennial Challenges program for space technology competitions.
You can read the full United Nations General Assembly Resolution at United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA)
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You loonies have no clue what gravity does to a human body on earth and what's going on if this becomes less!
There is permanent challenge to the tonic muscle system to stay balanced and not fall over. If that challenge gets less, muscle- and bone structure atrophies i. e. disappears.
The changes happen very fast. If you lay horizontally in bed for one week, you loose muscles and noticeably weaker. It builds up right away on earth, but not so if the gravity is missing or less.
Astronauts in the space station have to excercise hard every day for 2 1/2 hours and still loose significant muscle- and bone mass in calves and lower back.
Guess why they are carried around in stretchers once they come back? It's not the stress of the return flight. They lost too much substance to be able to sustain their structure in gravity.
That's a major issue in space and obstacle for humans but never a popular topic.
Sticky floor - pffff!
2. Helium-3, fusion catalyst that's only found on earth as a by product of nuclear reactions and is about 50,000 a pound. That alone makes it worth it moneywise.
In his book "Moonrush," Dennis Wingo argues that besides Helium-3, platinum-group metals would also be a critical resource. From a review:
In the first part of Moonrush, Wingo makes the case for how lunar resources are critical for meeting the increasing energy demands of terrestrial civilization. Most people are aware of the fact that the quantity of fossil fuels, notably petroleum, is finite, and will run out sooner or later. Wingo discusses this in detail in the book, noting that even the most optimistic assessments of petroleum reserves--ones that make assumptions unlikely to be borne out in practice--would be insufficient to get the world through the 21st century. One alternative to gasoline-burning engines currently under active development is the hydrogen-powered fuel cell. Even these, though, have a resources problem that Wingo describes in the book: they rely on expensive, scarce platinum-group metals (PGMs). If the world tries to make the transition from gasoline engines to fuel cells, it could exhaust the supply of PGM elements on the Earth.
Of course, there is no shortage of such metals in space, particularly in asteroids. The Moon, on the other hand, would seem to be an unlikely place to find PGMs: the collisional process that formed from the Moon left it mostly devoid of heavy metals. However, Wingo makes an ingenious case for finding PGMs on or near the lunar surface, in the form of debris from asteroid impacts. While conventional wisdom has argued that impacts of large asteroids would vaporize most of the impactor, modern computer modeling has shown that a significant fraction of an asteroid impacting the Earth would survive in some form. In fact, some major sources of PGMs on Earth, such as Sudbury in Canada and sites in South Africa, have been linked to asteroid impacts. The Moon's lower gravity would mean slower impacts, making it more likely that significant portions of asteroids could survive. PGMs mined from those impacts could meet the fuel-cell needs of the Earth for centuries; the mining process would, in turn, also generate other metals like iron and nickel that could be used for settlements on the Moon and beyond.
The ONLY way that we're going into space permanently is if we forget about government taking the lead, and focus on capitalism.
I agree to an extent, but it's interesting how much the average person overestimates the amount the federal government gives to NASA. From a recent article in the Space Review on the government and business case for space activities:
http://thespacereview.com/article/644/1
One question asked people to estimate what percentage of the overall federal budget went to NASA. At the Capitol Hill event Unland showed several video clips where, to few people's surprise, focus group participants overestimated--often grossly--NASA's sub-one-percent share of the budget: answers ranged from five to fifteen percent, with one person saying "somewhere in the thirties". Those anecdotes confirmed previous surveys where people also overestimated NASA's budget.