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Europe Plans To Drill the Moon For Oxygen and Water by 2025 (fortune.com)
The European Space Agency hopes to be mining the moon for water and oxygen in six years' time. From a report: The agency took a big step toward this ambition by signing a deal with launch provider ArianeGroup on Monday. The one-year contract will see the company examine the possibility of mining regolith -- lunar soil and rock fragments that can yield oxygen and water, which could be very handy if you're trying to put a base on the moon. The mission would use an Ariane 64 launch vehicle. The European Space Agency (ESA) has already directed ArianeGroup, a joint venture between Airbus and Safran, to develop the craft, and its first test flight is anticipated in 2020. As for the lunar lander, that would come from the German startup PTScientists (which entertainingly stands for "Part-Time Scientists") -- the same outfit that aims to put the first mobile network on the moon.
Continuing the new Slashdot's tradition of using crappiest possible links that monetize for the site owner I see. Here is an article that actually has useful coverage of this.
This is proposal for a study yet to be done, which if actually funded and carried out would to some sort of extraction demonstration on the Moon. So we are several steps removed from any actual "mining the Moon" with this.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
ESA is an multinational space agency including Canada and Switzerland. While there are many EU member states also involved in ESA, ESA and the EU have nothing to do with each other directly. They are separate organisations. However, ESA is operating Gallileo which is an EU funded project. Beside that ESA gets its finances directly from its member states. https://www.esa.int/About_Us/W...
> if he wants to create a SpaceX mono culture in the launch industry
Do you have any evidence that he does? Seems to me his big motivation is to get into space in a real way, which would be aided by real competition. It's not his fault that all the would-be competition was too busy sucking at the government teat to actually invest in getting to space cost-effectively. And if they manage to turn themselves around now that he's proven it's possible? Well then everybody wins.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Where did you see that they wanted to move it elsewhere in space?
It's for a lunar base.
That said, even if they did move it elsewhere, the rate at which we could ever possibly mine it is so insignificant compared to the mass of the moon that the sun would have long since burned out before we could have possibly moved enough of its mass elsewhere to create any kind of perceptible orbit difference.
300 year problem? Try far more than even a trillion years.
I'm not sure that "shortsighted" is the term you are looking for.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Probably a lot closer than closer than that - we've got several that may achieve break-even in the next 5-10 years.
Everyone likes to rag on "20 years away", but if I promised you a $1,000,000 per year for 20 years to build something, and then cut your funding to only a $1,000 per year, do you really think you could still finish the same thing in 20 years, for $20,000 dollars, rather than the original $20 million you were promised? Because that's basically what happened with fusion research - progress per dollar received has actually pretty much kept pace with initial estimates, but they're still nowhere close to receiving the funding they were supposed to get over that first twenty years, and are getting further every year as funding continues to be cut.
The end result is that the all the reactors that are actually approaching break-even are those that were conceived to be developed and built on a shoestring budget through other channels, rather than the ever-dwindling tokamak funding. And frankly that may end up being for the best in the long term, as several of the new techniques promise to scale up their reaction energies much better than tokamaks, putting more difficult aneutronic fusion reactions within relatively easy reach.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
We have oxygen and water on earth. I think they're talking about mining oxygen and water to support a moon base.
"Prediction: within 10 years, Windows will be a Linux distribution." Me, 7-6-2016