Mining On The Moon

The Night Watchman writes "This article on Yahoo News outlines the latest plans in the works for a handful of private companies to begin lunar mining missions within the next 10 years."

Pointless Trivia

[Beowulfto]

``If there was a layer of gold a foot thick floating over the earth at an altitude at which we could send up a shuttle to go up and collect, it wouldn't be worth doing it,'' said Taylor.

I love little bits of useless info.

Re:Er, who owns the moon?

[slittle]

oops, forgot the quote

The United Nations (news - web sites)' 1979 Moon Treaty, one of several international outer space agreements, attempted to define the scope of private space activity. However, it was never ratified by some major powers such as Russia and the United States

1979 was a looong time ago. Any news since then?

Re:Lunar mining could change orbits and weather!

[J.C.B.]

Would we remove enough material to ever make a difference? I think not. More mass has been blasted from the moon from metor impacts than we will ever mine and take back to the Earth, has the loss of that mass affected the weather in any catastrophic way?

A few links

[kingdon]

The Artemis Project [asi.org] is more of a space club than a business (although it has some of the latter, and it is pretty successful compared with other clubs). Their web site contains a Data Book which was pretty good, but seems to now be members-only. Another good site is P.E.R.M.A.N.E.N.T. [permanent.com] with lots of details about things like all the different minerals on the moon. Much of it is kind of long term (for example, mining applications which only make financial sense if you are using the minerals off-earth). And at the risk of immodesty I have pages on mining [panix.com] and novelties [panix.com] (with the former being more for the intrinsic value, such as platinum for its appearance or chemical properties, and the latter more having value by virtue of being from the moon). My pages are more focused on near-term applications (such as bring platinum group metals to earth). I try to include some numbers (such as prices of platinum, how much flooding the market would affect the price, how much it would cost to get materials back from an asteroid and stuff), so that you can tweaks the assumptions and see how that affects the finances.

Moon composition, He3, and a reality check...

[laodamas]

Moon Composition*:
Compound Apollo II Basalt Apollo 14 Breccia Appollo 17 Regolith
SIO2 40.46 48.09 44.47
TiO2 10.41 1.51 2.84
Al2O3 10.08 16.72 18.93
FeO 19.22 9.53 10.29
MgO 7.01 10.18 9.95
CaO 11.54 10.67 12.29
Na2 .38 .73 .43

*L. Haskin and P. Warren "Lunar Chemistry"

Notice that key biogenic substances including hydrogen, carbon, and nitrogen do not make up a segnifagent portion of moon rock. (~50ppm)

In addition the moon posses Helium-3 (10ppm) - an isotope otherwise nonexistent in the inner solar system. It is a key substance for magnetic fusion with the reaction D + He3 -> He4 + H1, which produces about 18MeV of energy (and does not produce the nutron bombardment of the D + T -> He4 + n reaction used in current experimental fusion devices). If fusion power generation becomes reliable in near future, He3 is worth at least $1 million per kilo at today's energy prices. Unfourtantly with the ~$10,000 per kilo launch price today, it would cost almost $5 billion to extract $1 millon of He3 and return the product to earch.

Until launch prices drop to about $100 per kilo, moon mining is pointless. Launch prices this low are possible, though it means working around the gridlock of the Lockheed-Boeing-JPL-NASA-Congress monster in the US (who's launch costs are ~$10000/kilo on a delta III and twice that on the shuttle).

**Most of this post is based on information from the book "Entering Space" by Robert Zubrin.

-Chris Howard
May the sacred call of the dogcow guide you down the path towards nerdvana. MOOF!

Re:Minor catch in your plans . . .

[Graymalkin]

I think that's far too conservative of an estimate for fusion powered spacecraft (technologically, politically it could be never when a fusion powered spacecraft is sent to another planet). The most energy efficient AFAIK fusion reactors we're researching are colliding beam fusion systems (Tokamak). These work really well fusing Deuterium-Tritium but can be used with Deuterium-Helium and Hydrogen-Boron fuels as well. The problem with Deuterium-Helium fusion is the near complete lack of He-3 on the Earth's surface. We're much too hot with too little gravity to hold onto Helium for very long in any form and our atmosphere blocks most of the cosmic rays that form it. The Moon however would be a good source of it since there's nothing protecting the regolith from cosmic ray bombardment. With CBF reactors once you get stable fusion with one fuel source most of your work is done in getting to use other fuel sources. I think cutting your timetable in half would be a little better of an estimate.

Automated Mining Facilities

[Leif_Bloomquist]

We can't even create automated mining facilities on Earth for fuck's sack, how are we going to get them working on the moon?

Why wasn't this flagged as "Troll"?

Several automated mining projects have started up on Earth in the last couple of years. They're all working pretty well last I heard. I'm involved with a couple of them.

A few links off the top of my head:

Mine Automation at LKAB [mine-automation.com]
Mining Automation Program [telemining.net]
Automated Mining Systems, Inc. [robominer.com] (disclaimer, I work there)

Also this Slashdot story [slashdot.org] about the topic.

True, getting something similar going on the moon would be exponentially harder (radiation hardening of electronics, fuel sources, etc.) but it IS being done here on Earth.

Pt and Ti not interesting at nearly 70K$/troy oz

[hey!]

The cost in 1960s dollars to return 1500 pounds of cargo was 340 million, or about a quarter of a million dollars per pound (in Y2K dollars, about 1.7B, and a bit over a million dollars/lb). Of course, if we did not use man-rated systems, and use lightweight robots instead, we'd save a lot of weight and costs.

But -- if we achieved hundred fold increases in pounds returned per dollar over 1960s figures by eliminating the man rated systems and using advanced techniques unavailable then, you are still talking $10,000 per pound, or about $685/troy ounce (at the price we paid for the Apollo missions more like 68K/troy oz). Aluminum and titanium are out of the question even with the optimistic hundred fold improvements. So is Gold, at current rates of about $275/troy oz, and platinum at about $440/troy oz.

As an optimist, you might think that if Pt doubled in price, and we could achieve hundred fold increases in monetary efficiency for retrieving it, then we could go to the moon to get it. This is true, but only if we could just go there and pick it up lying around. However, as the article points out, there is no volcanic activity to concentrate metals in veins, and no erosion to break it up into convenient nuggets to find. So, you're going to have to mine it, and you'd have to process a huge amount of material at that because you aren't going to find many rich veins.

This means mining machinery. During the last /. flamefest, I looked up the weights of some typical mining machines and they are astounding.

A small crushing machine [equipmentcentral.com] weighs over thirty english tons. Granted if you were to make a machine to be transported via spacecraft, you would do everything you could to make it lighter. However, we are talking about crushing rocks here; cleverly reinforced tinfoil and carbon fiber are not going to do the job. You'd also have to pack a fairly powerful nuclear reactor, since even this small machine requires well over a hundred kilowatts to operate. This means the reactor would have to be packed to survive launch accidents. Cassini's RTGs, for example, provide well less than a thousand watts when they are fresh. Some Russian designs for space flight produce 5-6KW, still an order of magnitude too small to run a small crusher. You would need much larger reactors, properly shielded and packaged to survive launch accidents.

Furthermore, this example machine is a small machine, and the lack of volcanically concentrated ore veins means you have to have a machine with a lot of capacity. It would be just barely feasible to put one of these small machines on the moon with a Saturn V (6.1 million pounds to deliver about 45 english tons of payload to lunar orbit).

I don't want to be a wet blanket here. The point is that mineral wealth does not seem to me at this time a sufficient reason to go to the moon (although these people may have found clever ways around these obvious objections, and all bets are off if we look outside the next twenty years or so). It seems to me at this time only commodities which are lighter and more precious than metals can justify the cost -- things like knowledge, and prestige.

If somebody was going to put a research station onto the moon to use its unique environmental properties (moderate gravity, hard vacuum in large quantities) I would be less skeptical. I'd be even less skeptical of a scheme to put super rich tourists on the moon, or if a single ultra wealthy individual like Bill Gates announced he was going to spend his fortune on a visit to a moon. Clearly it is technically feasible to go there and back, it is just not financially feasible to do it for ordinary kinds of massy commodities.