NASA Strikes Gold and Water On the Moon

tcd004 writes "The PBS NewsHour reports: there is water on the moon — along with a long list of other compounds, including mercury, gold and silver. That's according to a more detailed analysis of the cold lunar soil near the moon's South Pole. The results were released as six papers by a large team of scientists in the journal, Science Thursday. [Note: Nature's papers are behind a paywall; for a few more details, reader coondoggie points out a a story at Network World.] The data comes from the October 2009 mission, when NASA slammed a booster rocket traveling nearly 6,000 miles per hour into the moon and blasted out a hole. Trailing close behind it was a second spacecraft, rigged with a spectrometer to study the lunar plume released by the blast. The mission is called LCROSS, for Lunar Crater Observer and Sensing Satellite."

Comments

cheaper mining?

[ddxexex]

If you don't have to worry about the environment on the moon, how much gold (or rare earth metals or whatever) do you need to make a robotic lunar mining mission viable?

Re:cheaper mining?

[c6gunner]

As stupid as it would be to go to the moon just for the sake of mining gold, I'd pay good money to see the looks on the faces of all the gold-hoarding doomsday-libertarians when the value of their stockpile plummets overnight.

Re:cheaper mining?

[Iron Condor]

What AC said above: even if Moon was solid, 24k gold, it'd not make economical sense to mine it there. End of story.

No, not end of story by a long shot.

Mining gold on the moon makes economic sense exactly if it results in gain in excess of the original investment. How many dollars can you charge for an ounce of, not gold, but gold from the moon? The gold market is already based strictly on what people think is valuable. The price of gold has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the price of mining gold.

Does it even have to be gold? How about a speck of genuine moon rock (in a nice clear plastic cast) - yours for only ... $59.99? How many slashdotters would buy such a thing? What would it cost to get, say, a couple kg of that back to earth? A billion dollars? That's the price of a nice oil rig. In other words: that's the kind of money that is already available and people are already expending it because they expect a decent return on that investment.

You may want to be just a shade more careful with calling things economically infeasable.

Re:I can see it now...

[amicusNYCL]

It really wouldn't matter if there were miners trapped on the moon. We would just shut them down and build a few new ones, or probably have reserves on standby. Maybe we could recover them for parts when it's convenient.

Or were you assuming humans would be doing the mining?

Who has the mine rights? The us? USSR? China? NASA

[Joe The Dragon]

Who has the mine rights? The us? USSR? China? NASA it self? Neil Armstrong?

Re:Wouldn't mining the moon be a bad idea?

[Mycroft_VIII]

Until they revolt over the wardens inept and corrupt administration and the fact that crucial survival resources are dwindling to the danger point from being shipped to earth.
      That's when the loonies start dropping big cans of whatever is handy on earth. With difference in gravity wells it's not that hard to effect kilo or even megatons of energy release at the impact point.
      With a smart enough computer aiding in the logistics of the revolution it can happen.

Mycroft