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Billionaire Teams Up With NASA To Mine the Moon
schwit1 writes: Moon Express, a Mountain View, California-based company that's aiming to send the first commercial robotic spacecraft to the moon next year, just took another step closer toward that lofty goal. Earlier this year, it became the first company to successfully test a prototype of a lunar lander at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The success of this test—and a series of others that will take place later this year—paves the way for Moon Express to send its lander to the moon in 2016. Moon Express conducted its tests with the support of NASA engineers, who are sharing with the company their deep well of lunar know-how. The NASA lunar initiative—known as Catalyst—is designed to spur new commercial U.S. capabilities to reach the moon and tap into its considerable resources.
We have no use for He-3 in the foreseeable future, though. And if we really need it, we can synthesize it.
Disregarding He3, the only point of lunar resources is for orbital/space construction. It is easier to reach LEO from the moon than from Earth. Reaction mass requirements for Lunar surface to LEO are much lower than from Earth surface.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Actually, no. It works just fine, you can hot-forge it much like iron (really, I've done it, when its glowing it moves under a hammer much like iron does), machining it requires tungsten carbide tooling but most people use that anyway, and you don't have to worry about heat-treatment, the stuff will be just as hard as mild steel (RC52ish) no matter what you do to it. The real cost is creation: converting titianium dioxide to metallic titanium on a commercial basis is complex, takes a lot of energy, and results in a material that doesn't melt until it gets over 3000F, but must be alloyed (melted and mixed with other elements) to be usable. The cost of the raw material is almost irrelevant -- TiO2 is used in virtually every modern paint (to the extent that it's a standard test for forgery detection on art, unless you're compounding your own paint from linseed oil and powdered minerals, it's probably got titanium dioxide in it).
What makes you thinks these other being in the universe aren't just as bad or worse. What makes you think these hypothetical other beings in the Universe are even watching? Hopefully you're not going to cite any alien abduction stories.