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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.
Do you know how much it costs to get it off Earth's surface?
Have you seen how much of a shit-fit environmentalists throw when anyone wants to mine anything on this planet anymore? Nobody should have any qualms about mining anything on the Moon since it has no ecosphere to start with. Of course there's the question of it being economical to do so..
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
If you think the Keystone pipeline is Bad, consider a few thousand tons of some mined material from the moon coming into the atmosphere at ~17,000 mph.
(sarcasm)What could go wrong?(/sarcasm)
Sometimes the "writing on the wall" is blood spatter...
Concentration of He-3 on the moon is in the low ppb range. That means you'd have to process billions of tons of regolith to obtain the 25 tons of He-3.
On Moon there is gas called helium 3
Helium 3 fusion is far more difficult than DT fusion. We aren't even close to commercial DT fusion. It is at least decades away, and He3 fusion is decades beyond that, if ever. Even if He3 fusion was working, getting it from the moon, where it is less than 50 ppb in the lunar regolith, is not realistic.
"Helium 3" has got to be the dumbest possible reason to mine the moon.
Metals and oxygen, ready to be chemically separated... already outside of Earth's gravity well, and therefore not incurring the energy costs, environmental issues, and safety concerns of launching them from Earth's sea level. That's kind of a big deal, if you want to start large-scale construction in space.
About four billion tonnes a year, equal to the US and China's combined coal production.
On the moon.
Nobody should have any qualms about mining anything on the Moon
Apparently you didn't see the shit-fit people were throwing several years ago when we deliberately crashed a probe into the moon to observe the composition of the regolith it kicked up. Dumping trash on the moon they said. Ridiculous, but there are apparently quite a few people on Slashdot who had this opinion.
I thought at one point in time, it was agreed on that no single nation "owned" the moon. Therefore, what happens if someone goes up there for a commercial project and sells material gathered there? Is it "first come, first to profit"?
The Outer Space Treaty
Article II: "Outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means."
Article I says, in part, "Outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, shall be free for exploration and use by all States without discrimination of any kind, on a basis of equality and in accordance with international law". I would look to maritime law regarding resources in international waters as a basis for how lunar resources might be handled.
Article VI says, in part, "States Parties to the Treaty shall bear international responsibility for national activities in outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, whether such activities are carried on by governmental agencies or by non-governmental entities, and for assuring that national activities are carried out in conformity with the provisions set forth in the present Treaty. The activities of non-governmental entities in outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, shall require authorization and continuing supervision by the appropriate State Party to the Treaty." Since this is a US company they will need authorization from and supervision by the federal government.
"what's up there? This is stupid!"
Seriously, turn in your geek cards, every fucking one of you. I don't care what's up there, if someone wants to put a fucking space colony on the moon, FUCKING AWESOME. We're not going to get off this rock until people start doing shit, even if that shit fails and blows a lot of money, because we can learn from those failures and keep trying.
Seriously, it's like I just stumbled into high school again. "Who needs math, math is stupid! Why do you read science fiction, that's stupid!" Fuck off, some of us have dreams.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
And lunar He-3 mining is pretty useless.
1) He-3 isn't all that useful. It has niche applications on earth in imaging, neutron detection, and so forth, but there's not really anything that would require bulk He-3 except for hypothetical He-3 fusion reactors.
2) There are no He-3 fusion reactors.
3) There's not going to be He-3 fusion reactors. It's a solution in search of a problem. We still struggle to get D-T fusion going which is orders of magnitude easier, why would we complicate the problem (and ridiculously raise the cost) just to reduce the short-term radioactivity (emphasis: short term) - radioactivity that we can actually *use* for useful breeding purposes? And if we really wanted to reduce radioactivity, we'd just skip He-3 and go straight to p-B fusion, which actually is effectively aneutronic, versus He3-D which is just low neutronicity..
4) Only low parts-per-thousand of the moon's helium is He-3. So unless you want to be sending huge quantities of helium back for a tiny bit of He3, you've got to do bloody isotope separation on the moon.
5) Only parts per million of the lunar regolith is helium. So you have to mine and bake a *lot* to get a very little amount of of helium. Which of that, only a tiny fraction is what you actually want (#4). Meanwhile, due to the cost of getting your consumables there, your labor and parts costs on any moon colony are going to be utterly absurd.
6) We can already make He-3 here on earth. It's a byproduct of tritium decay - tritium itself being breedable from lithium. Old nuclear weapons are for example often a source of He-3. Do you know what they do with it? For a long time, they were getting rid of it, converting it back to tritium. The market for making glowy paint for watches was more than the market for anything using He-3.
He-3 mining is an excuse to travel to the moon disguised in an economic wrapper.
"Are you hungry? I haven't eaten since later this afternoon." -- Primer