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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."
As a deep ecologist, I believe it would be inheriently wrong from an environmental standpoint. But I am curious to know what other people here think... is there an "environmental" issue involved?
I wouldn't mind to seeing a bit of spin on the moon's rotation. It would increase the real estate value of the dark side of the moon.
...we need to get a working biosphere on Earth. The last one ran dangerously low on O2 and that problem needs to be understood, fixed and thoroughly tested before we even think about setting up a colony on the moon.
In some ways it'd be a good test to have a biosphere at the bottom of the ocean. You'd have the same combination of a harsh external environment and pressure differential (albeit reversed) as you would in space. You could be entirely reliant on a local source of power such as a deep sea thermal vent but emergency assistance would be much easier
One of these days I'm moving to Theory - everything works there
Plankton and other various types of biological creatures in the open oceans account for more than 80% of all oxygen production on this planet. There should be more study on raising them in closed environments with all the necessary equipment to prevent a biological "meltdown" in such a system. I can think of a good purpose for genetically-modified plankton, that produce an exponentiantly-greater amount of oxygen than the original species. Think of grabbing an "oxygen tank" that is nothing more than a closed-environment aquarium (like those miniature-ecosystems sealed in a glass bottle and sold to children), only it is full of oxygen-producing sea creatures that are regulated to their capacity depending on how much catalyst food/chemical is provided to entice them to self-regulate their oxygen-producing capabilities. Then again, oxygen isn't primarily what a man breathes to survive; so think of a multiple-chambered "breathing apparatus" that contains all the necessary stages of production of genetically-modified organisms.
without prejudice
Science & Technology / Private spaceflight
Rocket renaissance
May 11th 2006 | LOS ANGELES
From The Economist print edition
The era of private spaceflight is about to dawn
IMAGE (Mary Evans)
TWO years ago next month space travel underwent its Wright-brothers moment with the first flight of SpaceShipOne. The roles of Orville and Wilbur were played by Burt Rutan, who designed the craft, and Mike Melvill, who flew it—although they were ably assisted by Paul Allen, one of the founders of Microsoft, who paid for it. Of course, history never repeats itself exactly. Unlike the brothers Wright, who were heirs to a series of heroic failures when it came to powered heavier-than-air flight, Messrs Rutan and Melvill knew that manned spaceflight was possible. What they showed was that it is not just a game for governments. Private individuals can play, too.
Now, lots of people want to join in, and most of them have just met up at the International Space Development Conference in Los Angeles, to engage in that mixture of camaraderie and competition that characterises the beginnings of a new technology. And, as might be expected, they are brimming with two of the necessary ingredients of success: ideas and money.
First, the money. So far, more than $1 billion is known to have been committed to building private spaceships and the infrastructure to support them. For example, Mr Rutan’s follow-up vehicle, SpaceShipTwo, is expected to cost its backers, Virgin Galactic, $240m for a fleet of five. The spaceport in New Mexico from which these are intended to fly will account for another $225m, although New Mexico’s government is planning to raise this money itself.
These are not small sums, of course. On the other hand, Virgin Galactic has already banked $14m of deposits towards the $200,000 fare from people who want to travel on SpaceShipTwo, even though it has yet to be built, let alone flown.
All this suggests that spaceflight, if not exactly entering the age of the common man, is at least entering the age of the moderately prosperous enthusiast. For entrepreneurs, it is no longer necessary to have billions of dollars to get into space; millions will now do. And for those who merely wish to travel there, and have a few hundred thousand in the bank, reality beckons—provided that at least one of the ideas actually works.
Chocks away
As with aircraft a century ago, a plethora of designs are competing with each other, and there is no certainty about which will prevail. The initial goal is to build a “suborbital” vehicle. This will not have to develop the tremendous speed needed to go into orbit around the Earth. Instead, it will travel briefly into space, offering a short thrilling ride out of the atmosphere, a few minutes of weightlessness, and a spectacular view of the planet from about 100km. Four important criteria are how you take off, what fuel you use, what your craft is made of, and how you come back.
Most people’s vision of a rocket launch is straight up from the ground. But, of the five vehicles most likely to be developed (see table), two will actually be launched from the air. SpaceShipTwo will be carried to high altitude by a purpose-built aircraft known as Eve before its rocket motor is ignited. And Explorer, a vehicle being designed by Space Adventures, will be launched from the top of a high-altitude Russian research plane called the M-55X, according to Eric Anderson, the firm’s president and chief executive.
As Dennis Jenkins, a consultant engineer at NASA, America’s space agency, points out, this is similar to using a two-stage rocket to get into space, with the aircraft acting as the first stage. However, a plane offers several advantages over a throw-away boos
The extreme centre is the paper's historical position. --Geoffrey Crowther
And start a total national race among other nations to try and get their and stake their claims. Then, claim Mars, and repeat. You'll never get to space if no one can own it.
This is my sig.
I have always wondered if it would be feasible to simulate Earth's gravity with a kind of large merry-go-round. Put apartments at the end of rotating arms, on hinges, and then spin it fast enough to make the vector sum of the moon's gravity and the centrifugal force in your rotating frame equal to 9.81 N/kg. The hinges at the top of the apartments would make the apartment always line up with the "gravity". You could spend all your non-working hours in a human-friendly force field. I wonder if the large (compared to Earth) delta between the force at your head and the force at your feet would cause an unsafe stretching of your spine.
Nice f'ing ad hominem attack there. Did I say anywhere it was the humans having to put the energy into this work equation? Did you actually read the very next line where I mentioned idler wheels? (FYI, statistically very few people that are born with idler wheels are accepted into the astronaut program.)
The only thing I wrote that said anything about human effort was the difficulty it would add to walking. Otherwise, I was referring mostly to machinery and energy, which, coincidentally enough, is the topic of TFA about mining. The "sticky" looks like it was simply a bad idea pasted on by the submitter of the article.
Yes, the ISS denizens are denied the health benefits of gravity. Yes, the residents will have to work hard to maintain some semblance of muscle mass, and even then they're almost certain to be wheelchair bound upon their return to earth several years later. (A mars trip would end in a year-long zero-G voyage, just what they wouldn't need after their extended 1/3 G stay on the surface.) They may even end up in something like an iron lung for a while, if the air pressure isn't kept high enough to keep their diaphragm working against earth-weight air pressure. But frankly, I don't care all that much -- it's a known hazard, and anyone accepting these missions knows full well what they've got to look forward to upon their return. It's part of the sacrifice that every single one of them is volunteering to make. Sure, it'd be nice if they weren't severely weakened by the environment, but it's their choice. Not mine, and not yours.
P.S. Maybe next time you'd get a less snotty reply if you didn't open your post with an accusation. A little politeness goes a long way.
John
Why is the assumption here that a) the space shuttle is the only method of getting material from the moon to earth (send the shuttle to the moon to pick it up? Are you nuts?) and b) that the only goal is mining "rock" from the moon to send back to earth?
Calculating the cost of mining the moon using the cost of launching a shuttle to earth orbit makes no sense. The shuttle is not the cheapest or most efficient way to get mass into orbit, and it sure as hell isn't the easiest way to get it back down (gravity does a good job of that). Why would getting material from the moon to earth require any launch at all from earth (once you are done building the mining base)? How about using the moon's massive solar power potential to railgun things into earth orbit? Maybe titanium, with its very expensive, earth-evironment unfriendly, power-hungry processing requirements?
Second, we need titanium and items made therefrom in space for making habitats, ships, exploration probes, and so on. Things which, if made on the moon, we don't have to ship up from earth orbit. You have it all backwards, the enormous cost of getting material into orbit from earth is the -pro- moon mining argument if you want to do anything interesting at all in space.
Want a big telescope on the moon? Make it there. Want a big orbital hotel for billionaire socialites to visit? Prefab the superstructure on the moon where power, titanium, and transportation are cheap. Want an orbital kinetic energy weapon to drop bullets on your enemies from above? Maybe not, but somebody does, and will be willing to pay for it. Make it on the moon, and load it with rocky ammo while you're at it, for free. I suspect a working moon mine/factory would pay for itself pretty easily, without a single gram exported to earth's surface.
Then there is the tremendous experimental value - learning to mine in space, learning to live there, etc. If we -ever- want to do any human space exploration, colonization, or teraforming, we have to start somewhere, learning the basics. The automation technology alone will be terribly useful back on earth, while lessening the number of humans we have to support on the moon.
Is moon mining economically feasible right now? I don't know, but I do know mining concerns invest a hell of a lot in an operation and expect their profits to come in after many years of mining, not today. Even if moon mining was break-even economically, it would be worth the learning experience - and would leave those profit-minded among us with the tools to do more profitable things in space. Even if it takes several generations of mining colony to get to that stage, the long view favors the first steps.
"The Earth is the cradle of the mind, but one cannot eternally live in a cradle."
- Konstantin E. Tsiolkovsky
The purpose of life is to spread.
If you think we should stay on this rock until a meteor wipes us out, you are complicit in a crime worse than genocide: the extermination of life as we know it in the universe.
As the only life forms with the ability to travel to other planets, it is our responsibility to bring life to other planets! This is far more important than trying to maintain some "balance" of nature. There never has been and never will be such a balance, anyway.
Space travel is the most important persuit in the history of Earth. Without it, there will eventually be no life.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
I will agree that there is evidence that organizations known as governments today do much more than simply arbitrate disputes, so perhaps the definition has grown to encompass those features. However, I think those 'expansions' are not unique to governments; there are many organizations that are not governments which provide social and economic programs, for instance.
I also think it is very dangerous to say that a government is "supposed to do whatever those that give the government power want it to do". While that is a very attractive philosophy in our modern society, I believe that simply causes governments to lose their ability to effectively arbitrate disputes: being fickle tends to reduce credibility.
Anyway, this has been an interesting discussion, and it is at times like this I wish this forum was a little more condusive to this type of discourse. I actually do not mind the challenge to my assertions, because if those assertions are found to be weak I want to change them to whatever is really true.
Now I wonder...is there a way to transfer this little thread over to the Politics section?
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
Last I heard most of the moon was mainly made up of silica. It's not like earth where there are vast deposits of a wide variety of reasonably pure materials. There is oxygen trapped there, (silica oxide iirc?) but it's difficult to extract. We are certainly not getting food or water from the moon.
I once read a quote from a nasa engineer, saying something about a pile of dog droppings found on the moon would be the richest source of carbon for miles around. Us being carbon-based life, require carbon in pretty much all our food. There is very little hydrogen on the moon, and that nicely rules out the production of water.
For now I think the astronauts had better pack a lunch.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
I'll agree that if you have the normal American slackass desk-job, losing muscle mass might be a problem. But keep in mind that mining is still a very physical job, and so loss of muscle mass may not be as big of a problem.
The biggest danger to humans, imo wouls be silica dust -- either clogging and destroying needed equipment or giving miners the moon equivelent of "black lung". I'm not sure how mines on earth solved this, but it seems to me that the troublem would be harder to control in 1/6th earth gravity.
So while it may seem necessary to use a sticky material to adhere one's boots
to the floor -- its probably easier to carry 1000 lbs (Earthweight) of weights
which would add an additional 166 lbs of Moonweight, making a 200lb earth person
weigh 200 lbs on the moon.
Alternatively, residents of the moon could just get used to it and learn to use their bodies effectively in light gravity without requiring a constant supply of sticky boots.
The space shuttle is only an EXAMPLE. Obviously it's not capable of performing the mission discussed here, but you can use it to get an idea of what it would cost to transport stuff to and from space. To do mining, you'd have to design an entirely new space transport system. You think that'd be cheap?
The point was that ANYTHING you mine on the moon would to humongously expensive to transport back to earth. Your choices are a) send back raw material for processing on earth or b) build processing facilities in space/on the moon. Either would be tremendously expensive - even if you were to build in place, there'd be expenses involved in sending up the capital equipment you'd require. Presumably you'd need workers, who'd want really, really big compensation in return for the high level of risk, spartan conditions, and rarity of home visits. The workers would require life support. So you'd have to bring water, etc, or mine THAT in place and do hydroponics. Think about what it would take to build a manufacturing plant in the middle of the Sahara desert. Then imagine having to lift everything needed to do this straight up for 250K miles.
But it's the only system we actually HAVE. See above for costs to design/build a "more efficient" system.
Exactly right. But if you want your returning materials to actually SURVIVE the return trip without burning up or getting smashed to pieces, gravity won't do the job. You'll need a re-entering spacecraft.
So all we'd need to do is bring/make railguns and massive solar arrays on the lunar surface. See above for the enormous cost of doing this. Not economically feasible even for titanium.
You obviously have a different definition of "need" than I do. We might "want" to do these things, but how do you figure we need to? Who would want to pay the gigantic costs for this stuff? The fact is, the only reason we would "need" any of this is to support the aforementioned space activities! Your reasoning is circular.
I could go on, but you get the idea. I'm definitely down with the idea that space exploration is valuable enough to do just for the scientific benefits. Maybe in the process we'll figure out enough about how to do it that economic activity becomes viable (I'm not holding my breath). But I'm not in favor of spending truly ludicrous amounts of money on space-based manufacturing just for the sake of space-based manufacturing.
Sean