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.

Comments

It's about Energy

[QuantumReality]

On Moon there is gas called helium 3, which 25 tons can provide power for whole USA for a year. On earth there is only about 10 kg of it. Who controls the moon, controls the future.

Re:Considerable resources?

[CrimsonAvenger]

But the stuff we want to put in Earth orbit is typically very high tech. How do you get from raw ore to microchips, solar panels, and high grade optics, without bringing it down to Earth surface first ?

Well, no...

Yes, it's true that microchips aren't really feasible for building on the moon. On the other hand, microchips don't really weigh all that much, compared to, say, the box you put the microchips in. Or the ISS modules. Satellites are mostly aluminium and steel, not microchips.

If we only had to loft the computers and similar small items from Earth, while larger structures like whole ISS modules were built on the moon, expanding the ISS would be much cheaper.

Likewise, a Mars-bound spacecraft (manned or unmanned) would be cheaper to build if the structural elements were built from Lunar material (either on the moon or at the ISS) and only the high-tech parts were built on Earth.

Note that it's even possible to get reaction mass from the moon, if we can either find H2O or are willing to burn aluminium and oxygen (yah, Al2O3 is going to be some seriously abrasive reaction mass when it's pushed out a rocket nozzle, but we're only going to use it the once, right?

Hell, even if we can't find water, 80%+ of H2/O2 rocket fuel is the O2 part. And there's plenty of that to be had on the moon. Just lifting the H2 to LEO is a potential big savings.

Note, of course, that none of this is relevant unless we decide to get seriously into space again. If all we're ever going to do is send an occasional probe out, and build commsats/spysats/positioning-sats, the moon is completely irrelevant.