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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."
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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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Regolith is the loose rock and dust that covers most of the moon's surface
There is no known material worth the expense of mining it on the moon, but I suspect companies such as Weyland-Yutani may find it a worth while exercise for research purposes.
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.
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.
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Sounds good to me. Let's send them all there.
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woo..
gonna need some specifics before I get behind this project.
Inefficient. You get much more bang for your buck killing other people.
Violence is like duct tape. If it doesn't solve the problem, you didn't use enough.
There is no known material worth the expense of mining it on the moon
It would be about time that the media talk a bit more loudly about the uranium deposits found on the moon.
Is it worth the expense vs. mining on earth ? Yes, because it allows a use that would otherwise need uranium to be lifted out of the earth's gravity well : build a refinery that produces fuel for Orion-style ships.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion)
Or even that beam power back to earth without having us manage nuclear wastes.
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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.
For others who didn't know about that discovery:
http://www.space.com/6904-uranium-moon.html
"Lame" - Galaxar
There is no known material worth the expense of mining it on the moon
It would be about time that the media talk a bit more loudly about the uranium deposits found on the moon. Is it worth the expense vs. mining on earth ? Yes, because it allows a use that would otherwise need uranium to be lifted out of the earth's gravity well : build a refinery that produces fuel for Orion-style ships. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion) Or even that beam power back to earth without having us manage nuclear wastes.
I agree with your first suggestion, but am a bit of wary of the last one (when a power-beam operator says "oopsie" because he's just let the beam track across Manhattan...well that would be more than a minor incident.)
On the other hand, building a fleet of real spaceships using the Orion propulsion principle to explore the solar system—and maybe even further out—is something that I think would be super-worthwhile. Of course, exploring would not be the only purpose of such a fleet. Others would be to build new factories and mines throughout the solar system. A real Orion could easily carry enough cargo to start a basic set of industrial installations, along with a small city of workers and technical experts that will make the new enterprise work.
Before such ships can be built, more is needed than a uranium refinery (or breeder reactor) on the moon. That will provide fuel (presuming the parent is correct in saying there's lots of uranium to be found on the moon). To build a ship, you're going to need a full-fledged industrial establishment on or about the Moon. You're going to need metallurgical experts, mining experts who can find and mine the requiring metal-bearing ores, and mechanical designers and factories that can build structural support members and metallic hull plates. You will need expertise in the design and manufacture of electronic hardware that will fulfill the manifold functions needed by the Orions. You'd need experts in hydroponic gardening, because rations that have to be shipped up from earth are going to cost a fortune. You'd have to find all the materials needed to build electronics, also. (In the short term, perhaps for the first ship, electronics could be sent up from Earth; they're relatively light, and not terribly expensive to launch. The same thing is true for small consumer goods. But eventually, the new High Industrial Enterprise should aim to be self-sufficient, as any political instability on Earth would very quickly leave them isolated.
The real difficulty of starting an Orion-based space civilization in our solar system is that getting the money to fund that first expedition is going to be very difficult. The only thing that will accomplish this is to convince potential investors that there will be a monetary reward for investing in the project. This has happened before—for example, risk-takers financed many trade journeys to far-off and sometimes virtually unknown lands in the 16th through the 18th centuries. Some of these investors became rich, others lost their shirts. Good capitalists know that every investment brings with it a degree of risk, and a certain probability of lucrative success. The risk has never stopped capitalists from investing—providing they have been convinced that the chances of a big win outweigh the risks.
The problem then becomes: what rewards would accrue to earth-bound investors who financed the initial expedition to go to the moon, and build a technical/industrial complex that will, in turn, build an Orion? That is the crucial question; if it can be answered well, then the project will happen; if it cannot be answered satisfactorily, then we can forget about the "high frontier". Nobody on Earth is going to get wealthy because the expedition mines uranium to build an Orion, for in that case nothing is actua
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You realize that even if we had a constant supply of He3 on tap today we still couldn't use it right? In theory it might be possible to achieve fusion power using it. We aren't there yet. If we do ever get there then lunar He3 might well be worth it but we do have small supplies on Earth we can use to experiment with in the meantime.