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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."

2 of 348 comments (clear)

  1. Easy Legal Fix. by Beardo+the+Bearded · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.
  2. Re:Energy requirements? by moteyalpha · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It would seem that the dark and light sides of the moon comprises a heat engine. For example, a tube which was placed about the pole and filled with gas, would expand in areas exposed to the sun and contract away from the sun in a continuous cycle, much like the engine that powers the Earths weather. It would this would be extensible and provide the local energy by turbine to operate some robotic process.