NASA's Resource Prospector Mission Could Land On the Moon In 2020

MarkWhittington writes: Ever since President Obama foreswore interest in returning to the moon in his April 2010 speech at the Kennedy Space Center, lunar exploration has been on the back burner at NASA. According to a story at Space News, that may change starting around 2020 thanks to a project called RP15, the letters standing for "Resource Prospector," a rover designed to drill into the lunar regolith and collect samples for analysis. The rover, originating at NASA Ames Research Center, was recently tested on a simulated lunar surface at the Johnson Spaceflight Center south of Houston. RP15 was built by the same team at JSC that developed Robonaut 2, now being tested on the International Space Station, with the software being written at Ames. The tests at JSC involved the rover being controlled by engineers at NASA Ames, half way across the country in California.

Comments

The main idea is to use it UP THERE.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

The main idea of mining the moon or asteroids is to use the product up there.

It is HORRENDOUSLY expensive to lift mass out of the Earth's gravity well. If you're going to build any substantial structures up there, it may (if it's a lot, it WILL) be far less expensive to launch bootstrapping manufacturing technology and mine the resources on the high frontier, rather than burn resources to kick the finished products up there.

Once it's in orbit, if it can be packed to take some rough handling, getting it down is dirt cheap. Getting big stuff off the moon is also cheap, partly because the gravity well is so much smaller, but mostly because the atmosphere is almost nonexistent, so a solar-powered electromagnetic catapult can do nearly all of the job. So things mined and manufactured "up there", if that can be done cheaply enough, can be easily shipped "down here". (The main cost would be packaging and the disposable guidance system - which could be as cheap as a solar/laser sail or laser-ablated reaction mass coating, and/or the capital cost of busying out a reusable orbit-changer or time on the laser.)

Refining a lot of stuff does NOT necessarily take a lot of water. If you do use water in the process you can typically get it back to re-use. Also: Water is one of the things you'll be "mining" - assuming that's cheaper than trapping hydrogen from the solar wind and combining it with "industrial waste" oxygen from refining metals out of handy rocks