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The Prospects For Lunar Mining
MarkWhittington writes "With the discovery of vast amounts of water on the Moon, some frozen in the shadows of craters at the Lunar poles and some chemically bonded with the regolith, interest in lunar mining has arisen among commercial space entrepreneurs. Paul Spudis, a lunar geologist, has suggested a plan to return to the Moon, which features, among other things, robotic resource extraction and the deployment of space-based fuel depots using lunar water even before the first human explorers return to the lunar surface. But Mike Wall, writing in Space.com, suggests that there are a number of legal as well as technical issues involved in setting up lunar mining operations."
by using clones!
Regolith? Is that something like the monolith they found buried there about 10 years ago?
Have you tried turning it off and on again?
Please direct all complaints to:
Luna Mining Company
1 Moon Drive
Moon
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ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
I'm surprised the most obvious challenge in going to the moon isn't mentioned in the article: that it takes a huge amount of energy to get to the moon and then to get back. I mean what are we going to mine that has so much value? Water? Energy production uses a huge amount of water. Going to the moon for some water is counter productive.
It is a far more efficient use of energy to mine the mineral out of garbage dumps than try to try to ship it from the moon.
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I maxed my mining, now what news of herbing
There's a whole new planet just waiting to be overexploited and ruined by greedy corporations out there...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
But exclusivity over the land? Never! That's for speculators who trade nothing but currency. Screw them.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
we need a less fuel useing way to get there as the oil costs are high to get the moon.
Maybe Peter Kokh and the rest of the Lunar Reclamation Society (www.moonsociety.org) will see their dream someday.
I last heard from them in the late 1980s.
I note they have a chapter in India now. At least people somewhere haven't given up the dream.
Not until Notch says we can!
Lawyers on the moon.
Yeah, I can hardly wait for all the posts about how the moon has such a delicate ecosystem.
We certainly must not disrupt a pristine environment like that.
I can't think of one story about mining on the moon that didn't result in a lunar revolt. I'd say the last thing they have to worry about is who owns the resources. It's the staff/residents you have to watch out for.
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
Please tell me there's a plutonium core with a thin, dusty crust floating on top.
a number of legal and technical issues, not to mention the whole altering the moons gravitational pull on the earth and subsequent tidal and other planetary mass related issues....
"With the discovery of vast amounts of water on the Moon, some frozen in the shadows of craters at the Lunar poles and some chemically bonded with the regolith, interest in lunar mining has arisen"
I've seen some expensive bottled water but that has got to be a lot more expensive than Evian.
This is as unrealistic as the space-based solar power project from a few years ago. Where is it now? Oh yeah, can't happen.
There's no magnetosphere around the Moon. It's not healthy for humans to hang out there for too long. How are you going to justify shielding humans to work as miners when it's one of the most unglamorous, unskilled and low-paid jobs on Earth?
Machines? We don't have the technology for fully automated mining. There is a vacuum on the Moon, vacuum cementing means that every single machine and lubricant needs to be re-thought.
For what? The same elements are available on Earth with an entire civilization to supply energy, machines and cheap labor.
Raw minerals just aren't worth enough to justify it. The Moon could be made of solid gold you won't justify it.
He3? Give me a break. We have NO FUSION TECHNOLOGY.
STAR TREK WAS NOT A REALITY SHOW.
1) never clone somebody without their permission. 2) Aneutronic helium 3 Fusion... Sweet...
mmmmmmmmmm moon powder.
Wtf do they expect to find gold, diamonds, platinum? No, this would be more of a proof-of-concept study on the cheap. Waste of time and money given our current known propulsion tech. Oh but private enterprise you say? Better not be any subsidies coming from the govt.
His life is about to get a lot weird on the . . . Moon.
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
There are two completely orthogonal ideas being discussed in these articles: (1) Send humans to the moon again, and help them to survive and return, all at a more reasonable price, by extracting drinking water and rocket fuel (hydrogen and oxygen) from lunar ice. (2) Extract water from the moon and bring it down to low earth orbit for sale as a commodity (rocket fuel).
#1 raises the question of why it would be valuable to send humans to the moon again. The author of the airspacemag.com article says that we should do this as a warm-up for colonizing other planets in the solar system, and it should be done by the US federal government using tax money. This seems foolish to me. The other planets of the solar system are not good real estate, and there needs to be a clear justification for why humans should colonize space at all. If the justification is profit, then the US federal government doesn't need to fund it with tax money. If the motivation is the Larry Niven quip that "the dinosaurs didn't have a space program," then it's not at all clear that moon-then-Mars is the best way to go, and if we want to find out the best way to go, flying nationalistic propaganda missions for the US is not the best way to do it. The best way to go may be, for example, a space station orbiting Europa. We just don't know right now.
#2 is very sensible for any for-profit entity that can find a customer at low earth orbit willing to buy rocket fuel. But: (a) #2 doesn't require sending humans to the moon at all, and (b) this raises the question of who the LEO customers are, why they are there, and why they want to buy rocket fuel. Presently, the only prospective customers are the US and Russia, who keep humans in LEO for nationalistic propaganda purposes, and who might want to buy some drinking water; I doubt that that type of demand is sufficient to justify lunar mining. In the near future, we may have space tourists in orbit, but again it's not clear that they need *that* much drinking water. Uncrewed space probes going to the outer solar system could use rocket fuel, but I doubt that they need *that* much rocket fuel. So really the only reasonable customer would be someone who wants to send very large payloads to someplace like Mars, and this simply leads us back to the same issue, which is that the justification for sending humans to Mars is extremely weak for the foreseeable future.
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It's not clear that you'd own what you dig up? Who could stop you from using it?! I'd say the fundamental concept of ownership (if you've got it, it's yours) applies more than some bizarre treaty that's never had any real significance.
You seem to be worried that there isn't enough pie to go around.
Maybe part of the solution is to make more pie.
... is that Russia or India or Japan or anyone-but-the-USA that doesn't respect a bunch of bogus regulations that are designed to work to the disadvantage of the USA in the 1st place will be doing the mining, and we'll have to IMPORT the expensive, outer-space minerals that we should have been mining in the 1st place.
We don't even have a moon base. And building a moon base, purely to mine on the moon, is stupid. There is enough minerals down here (currently). The only way it would be worthwhile, is if we worked out fusion power and if helium-3 was far (far far) superior to anything on Earth for fusion.
http://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/space-flight/mining-the-moon
It looks like the idea is to mine the moon for materials to make fuel for space exploration.
Also, if we ever get fusion going, heavy isotopes of hydrogen and helium become possible targets.
TFA says there are 600 million metric tonnes. That doesn't sound like a lot to me, considering the reservoir down the road (not that big, and which dries out some years) is almost 30 million tonnes. So you'd get 20 years at the consumption of a medium city, out of a whole planet-size object's pole. It's about 1/35000 the volume of Lake Baikal, so it's really not that plentiful.
i'm sure that will be a problem when rockets use fossil fuels.
currently, they hydrogen and oxygen. both of which are abundantly accessible from earth. the main cost of getting to the moon isn't the cost of the fuel, its the volume of fuel required to escape earths gravity.
Building, deploying, and maintaining satellites in space, primarily from resources in space, is the best possibility I can think of as an industry that could be self sustaining and based in space while still providing the major economic benefit to the homeworld needed to bootstrap it. Sending satellites into space is so expensive today that valuable and potentially profitable services aren't mass market viable due to the cost of transporting people and things into space. Example: satellite phones. Imagine if there were a self-sustaining space-based satellite industry. In 100 years our descedents could be born in an asteroid-based, moon-based, or space-based sattelite complex colony.
We should start building up space-based industrial capacity from what's already available in space, which means rebuilding nearly from scratch. We should treat it as a variation on the sci fi theme "how would we rebuild modern industrial capacity in a post-apocolytic world after a massive depopulation event?" It needs to become self sustaining.
We should mine the moon and asteroids for raw materials, and build from there. I mean from the basics. Let's start by mapping out the asteroid belt exhaustively and identifying sources for all of the materials we need. We need to smelt ore in space. We need to start large scale biomass creation and harvesting in space. Because right now the moon is the most accessible source of water we know of in space, the moon is a critical early component of this.
Given the choice between establishing a foothold of the human race off of Earth, and eliminating poverty or cancer, give me space any day.
I wonder why people need to go to the moon just to mine. Yes, there are benefits about lunar mining. But, have you ever thought of possibly sparking another WORLD WAR? Wars have always been waged because of money and power. Now, that ownership of a country has been established, your bringing war in outer space... I don't know... But, the effort of lunar mining and its consequences are not a scene to behold... ~Vision Boards
Moon is made of cheese is a line of bullshit. When Einstein said it was, he was lying.
All you'll really find, though, is some iron and calcium. And probably a bunch of robots pushing the same piles of dirt around. And an abandoned lunar base broadcasting an alien message.
Relevant video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3PUgxBya4M
What would such a water mining operation look like? It seems like you will have to process a huge volume of regolith to extract a small amount of water, in effect, strip mining! If the government won't allow it on a West Virginia mountaintop, what makes anyone think they would encourage it on the moon where footprints are permanent?
an ill wind that blows no good
Unless we shipped these minerals to Saturn, they're still here. With enough energy, you can harvest all the elements you want out of our garbage and recycle them.
This is where NASA should be heading.
I can see it now, bottled water that's fresh from a lunar spring, only $1K/bottle. I'm writing a business plan now.
What better way to find a use for a Moonstalk, the lunar equivalent of a terrestrial Space Elevator. If the materials are available to do such a thing now then mining the moon may finally provide the commercial impetus to get into space. A Moonstalk would certainly remove the need for launchers from the moon to get the material into space.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
"I'm gonna build a spaceship, go to the moon, salvage all the junk that's up there, bring it back and sell it." So he put together a team. An ex-astronaut...a fuel expert...they built a rocketship... And they went to the moon. Who knows what they'll do next? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvage_1
"There is no known material worth the expense of mining it on the moon"
Helium-3 could be worth it, if mankind is able to harness fusion for power production. At least it's aneutronic and the Coulomb barrier isn't as high as with Boron.
the issue i see with a large scale mining of the moon (and shooting it into space), is what will happen with us changing the mass of the moon? I get that it's huge and we would only take a few % off it, but let's never say never here and consider in 100 years if we removed 1% of the moons mass, would this affect processes on earth?
Moving 1% of the Moon's mass in a century is equivalent to moving the entire mass of Earth somewhere else in less than a million years. I'm not sure how turning the entire Earth into human stuff would effect processes on Earth, but use your imagination. In other words, it's no longer relevant what processes are doing on Earth by the time someone has that kind of mass flow going on.
The moon is still warm inside, so if one would drill a deep enough hole, one would probably find water, oil and gas, same as on earth.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Shouldn't postpone this "lets fuck with moon" project until we fuck with the Earth beyond all hope?
Grrrr! These bird brains make me puke.
ToS forbid selling gold, so what's offered is the service to extract it.
Same for ice. Don't sell the ice, but just the service to get it where it's needed. i.e., the one responsible for the extraction of the ice isn't the company executing it, but the "buyer", the one who's requesting it to be extracted and receiving it.
Problem solved.
PS: Is the moon a pvp-zone? That'd add some additional fun.
"EPA" :
IMPROVISED ESSAY ON POSSIBLE ENVIRONMENTAL CONSEQUENCES OF IMPRUDENT MINING ON THE MOON.
VAST DUST HAZE. SELENE SEISMISICITY.
Extensive mining of the moon with heavy equipment will result in a dust-haze hazard extending tens of thousands of miles into space, and in seismic instability of the the moon - a small, rather 'springy' atronomical body - that tends to ring like a bell when struck by even minor disturbances.
VISCOSITY. ELECTRIC PHENOMENA.
The Haze will quickly interact physically and electrostatically with the solar wind, with many unfavourable possible results - usually relating to viscous behaviour of varying severity, and the occurence of massive electric flux or discharges equally variable in intensity, quantity and placement.
X-RAY AND NEUTRON EMISSION.
Studies must be made to ascertain the possibility of x-ray and neutron emission from interaction between the dynamic dust cloud and the solar wind. Such effects have been observed, foreseen and used as a scientific resource during recent satellite impact experiments on the moon. The x-ray and neutron flash from these comparatively minor events was sufficient to permit selene/geological imaging experiments to be successfully carried out.
ADDITIONAL COOLING AND HEATING OF EARTH.
The Haze's added shadow and penumbra - during eclipses - might, depending on its extent, achieve some climatological significance on earth. The reflection-effect might add regularly variable amounts of heat and light to the atmosphere and oceans. The 'trigger-effect' of such events and their consequences - should they occur - cannot be ignored.
SEISMIC INFLUENCE ON EARTH. TIDES.
Extensive mass displacements of the moon - due to the raising and expelling of dust or continuous seismic oscillations - will certainly affect tides and tectonic plaque or crustal stresses on earth. Very serious and *honest* studies must be made to determine whether or not these effects will be of relevant magnitude.
ECOLOGICAL EFFECTS ON EARTH.
Added Illumination.
The added illumination from a sufficiently large moon-dust haze would certainly affect most nocturnal creatures, their prey, and others otherwise influenced by the visibility of lunar cycles.
Predator-prey feeding cycles will be generally disturbed to some extent. The variation of herbivoire populations will affect plant populations and alter general ecological equilibria - positively and negatively.
Tides.
Tidal effects, even barely noticeable ones, would seriously disturb the habits and performance of most aquatic lifeforms. Deeper-sea lifeforms, affected by the mass-flows from the surface or continents, will thus also be affected.
Feeding and Reproduction.
Contiinental aquatic lifeforms - and that which interacts with them - will also be affected to some extent. Higher animals on land, whose reproductive cycles emulate the moon's - and might to some extent rely on its cues, visual or other - might exibit some signs of partial pressure or alteration.
Use and Exploration of Biological Resources.
These events would certainly affect most sorts of food-supply, and the activities related to their use or exploitation. Even locally low-level effects can translate to significant effects, overall.
SATELLITE DEGRADATION. REPARATIONS - SOCIAL, LEGAL, ECONOMIC, BUROCRATIC.
Should Haze effects such as grit, solar-panel electrification, shade-cooling, reflection-warming or radio interference affect geosynchronous - or even orbiting - satellites, the legal and operational structures must be prepared to exact reparations and enable repair of any damages incurred.
DAMAGE TO SCIENCE AND KNOWLEDGE - PROSECUTION INTENSIFIED.
Damages to scientific missions must have similar, and even more punitive and reparative sanctions and resources mounted, working and available. Damage to scientific missions catastrophically restricts humanity's capacity to determine and foresee critical modes of disturbances - trigger-effects and tipping points. This knowle
No doubt in 1350 keen feudalists were looking forward with equal enthusiasm to the allocation by the King of the first lunar demesnes.
1) to have property right, you need a body to give you that right
2) that body can't be national because otherwise it fall under the treaty
3) that leave the international body like UN
4) do you see the problem ? I do.
Correct, there are many things worth shipping, but you have to consider the destination, and you seem only to be considering raw materials. The moon may be a better (i.e. cheaper) place to refine materials or even to manufacture finished products. Think high grade vacuum, low temperatures, and low gravity and ability to use processes which would be impractical or dangerous on earth. I can think of vacuum stills producing very pure metals, and crystal growth cells for advanced materials as potential money spinners. Then of course we have the whole gamut of bio manufacturing. The risk of GM "escapes" would be greatly reduced, and of course the (presumed) absence of local objectors would reduce security costs (unless the Vegans arrive).
Seriously though., The early trips to the "New World" looked just as economically daft, and some failed, but think what a share in "Pilgram Fathers Inc" is worth today.
nec sorte nec fato
How that would impact life on Earth? I mean, the mass of Earth is almost constant (no huge variations)... but what would happen to our orbit if we start to bring massive amounts of minerals and other stuff from the Moon? As the orbit is related to mass... changing the mass of Earth and Moon would change something, no?
The Moon Shall Rise Again.
Space elevator to orbit and then a solar sail to the moon. Doesn't need to be fast and once set up costs almost zero energy (elevator regenerates power when descending, solar sail is obviously solar powered).
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I can't imagine how good things are going to go, if we are already trying to use up all of another orbiting planet/moon's resources even before we have been able to populate it....wow, making holes in it all over the place...no wonder people think of the moon as swiss cheese....it will become exactly that!
There are a lot of people excited about the prospect of using Lunar water to make rocket fuel to explore Mars and beyond. How much water is really there though? Headlines make it seem that there is a lot because there really is a lot compared to what we just recently thought was there but it's still very dry compared to Earth. If lunar water is used for rocket fuel will it be available for colonization? Would using it this way be shooting ourselves in the foot?
you don't have to actually DO anything to make the moon profitable!
just open some banks, print moon dollars and have them shuffle it around! instant profit!
Do we have anything even close to laws regarding explotation of Moon resources? This could be a major issue in the future; once someone starts mining the moon i guess others would follow...
Oh wait... yes it is.
Also for extra geek cred, if the Klingons have taught us nothing it is nothing bad can ever happen from mining from your moon, particularly for highly volatile fuel for spaceships!
I also get to piss off all hardcores by mentioning Star Trek and Starwars in the same breath!
$40,000 or more for a Troy Ounce of the stuff, thousands per gram of the material, $ Billions per ton...
"Well for one thing, the moon has one third less gravity than your earth, I don't know if you can understand that, but our vertical leap is beyond all measurement." -Ignignokt.
why dont they bomb all the narcos? lol Farandula y Famosos
I must of course post explaining to you that you have misused two and in fact you meant to use the word too. Then someone needs to come along behind me and post .....
Woosh!
It's like you people aren't even trying any more :)