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

Considerable resources?

[Art Popp]

Have you seen how much rock we have down here already?

Re:Considerable resources?

[Sperbels]

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.

Re:It's about Energy

[itzly]

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.

Re:It's about Energy

[ShanghaiBill]

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.

Re:I'm no Seleneologist but....

[jeffb (2.718)]

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.

I'm disappointed in my fellow geeks

[Rinikusu]

"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.