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."

The Real Treasure Of The Moon...

[cybrpnk]

The only thing worth mining on the moon is ice, if it really truly exists at the poles. The reason it is worth mining ice is that it can be broken down into hydrogen and oxygen via electrolysis and then you've got fuel and oxidizer for a Mars mission located at the bottom of a shallow gravity well. It's been a while since I ran the numbers (I used to work for Boeing in an advanced projects group) but running a Mars mission with lunar fuel and oxidizer makes a BIG BIG BIG difference in the feasibility of it. Say you have a Mars ship in Earth or lunar orbit with empty tanks you've got to fill. From Earth you use the Shuttle, and it takes a full external tank and hundreds of millions of $$$ to get a Shuttle-cargo-bay-sized slug of liquids into your Mars ship tanks - many many shuttle missions and $$$ to fill them. It takes a LOT fewer pounds of fuel to lift the same hydrogen / oxygen from the surface of the moon to fill those same Mars ship tanks. It's the same as running a war - everybody wants to be on the tank that rolls into liberate the city, but in reality the war was won months before by the logistics and supply lines that made that final push possible. So remember, boys and girls - forget platinum group metals, the real lunar riches are its ICE...

Slow news day at Yahoo?

[Gorobei]

What a totally moronic article: "it's not the technology that's the problem, it's the cost." Gee, who would have ever thought? If it costs us $20000/lb to get stuff in orbit, what the hell are we going to ship back to earth to make it worthwhile?

"The moon's got a lot of silicon and oxygen," Hey, news flash: its common name is "sand." We have a lot of it down on Earth too.

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?

We've got big mineral deposits in Africa we don't exploit because it isn't economically feasible to build a mountain railroad. No problem, let's build a self-assembling, automated mining facility, ship it to the moon, have it build a railgun to launch processed resources back to us. Oh, and to be cost-effective, why not make it self-replicating? WTF? Why not just invent teleporter technology while you're at it?

Re:they shouldn't be able to do this

[mshiltonj]

The whole universe was not put here so that we could carefully destroy planets one at a time.

Let's clarify: The universe does not exist for a reason. It simply exists.

We also have no intrinsic relationship with the universe, other than the fact that we are in it: it was here long before us and will mostly likely be here long after we're gone.

(I say "mostly likely" because I'm confident but not positive that we -- humanity -- are never going away either, but people call me arrogant about this)

The universe was not "put here" by anyone or for anyone. And even if it were, there is no way to know who did it or to what end. So stop being a dumass with your extra-terrestrial environmental alarmism.

Now, let's get one defintion straight. In a non-judgmental (non-"workers-of-the-world-unite") definition, exploit [dictionary.com] means, simply: To employ to the greatest possible advantage

I think that's exactly what we should do with the universe, go up there exploit the resources to our greatest advantage, bring stuff back here to improve the human lot, and repeat. That's what we do: we manipulate our enviroment to make our live's better That's why we have a gamecube and don't live in caves. We do everything we can to make our lives better.

We often disagree on what "better" is -- and that's why we have Amish people who like things the way they were 200 years ago. That's fine. Go build a barn. But stay the fuck out of the way of the rest of us.

We're not perfect. We screw things up. But, all in all, each generation is better off than the one before it. We live longer, we're healthier, we work less, etc. That's what we do.

The universe is an infinitely big place. Remember, the Milky Way Galaxy could blink out of existence and the universe wouldn't bat an eye. We are not cosmic park rangers.

So please pull your head out of your ass and get with the program: We have a lot of work to do.

It'll probably be a centuries before we get out of this rinky-dink solar system. We've got to get busy putting people on the moon, on mars, on io, on europa, on venus. We've got asteroids to turn into space stations.

And don't be a pussy about limited resources. Eventually, our sun will go red giant and fry all the inner planets to a crisp. That means all these precious resources have a built-in shelf-life already, no matter what we do.

By then, we had better be somewhere else. If we have to suck all the gas out of Jupiter to give us the juice to do that, then so be it.

Once we get off this puny planet, that's the scale of things. Hell, that's the beginning of the scales of things. The universe is infinite!

Note: I could go on. I can be anti-corporate also. I didn't say *how* we should do this, only that we *should* -- now. And that business interests in and of themselves are not evil.

I'd like to point out...

[Krokus]

...that, should the removal of debris from the moon cause any problems with its orbit or our environment, then we should be terribly concerned about the millions of pounds of cosmic dust that settles on the Earth (and the Moon) each year.

Re:I can't believe I'm replying, but

[cybrpnk]

You don't need the hydrogen and oxygen as an energy source - you need it as mass to throw out the back of your rocket to get your rocket to move forward. You can have a great source of power - solar or nuclear or whatever - and if you ain't got mass to throw out the back, you ain't going nowhere. Using electricity to split the water into gases is merely to prepare them to be a mass moving in the direction you want as a jet of steam.

Re:Pt and Ti not interesting at nearly 70K$/troy o

[Thag]

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).

Where did you get these numbers from? Is this the cost of a moon mission and the amount of rocks we got back? Since returning lunar material in bulk was never a goal of the moon missions, I would find those kinds of numbers to be relatively meaningless. Kind of like weighing the seashells from a vacation to Hawaii and calculating cargo shipping costs to there based on the cost of the vacation.

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.

Actually, the surface of the moon is already covered with lunar material that has been broken up for you: it's called "dust." Smashed up by millennia of impacts from meteors, asteroids, and the like. Look anywhere on the moon and you will find many tons of it. I'm not sure what the depth is, though, and it may vary.

Moreover, the astronauts did in fact find concentrations of minerals in the moon rocks they sampled, and this was found while moving at a five-minute-shopping-spree pace, mind you: their time on the moon was extremely valuable, and they were constantly hurrying to get everything done.

I'm very skeptical of the person from ASR making proclamations about the geological details of the moon. Experts get paid to voice opinions, but the truth is that we've literally only scratched the surface of the moon. We know some facts from the observations of the astronauts and the samples they brought back. But the astronauts didn't go everywhere, and they didn't get to concentrate on anything for very long. What we did find ruined a great many of the existing theories about the moon, and it seems likely that there are just as many bombshells up there remaining to be discovered. All we have right now are theories, based on a very incomplete sampling of facts.

One other big point you're missing is that the minerals and raw materials mined on the moon would have a far greater value in Earth orbit than they would on earth. In orbit, the $10,000 per pound you mentioned is ADDED to their value. How much would NASA pay for aluminum girders and panels that are already AT ISS? Sending them to Earth orbit from the moon is also far cheaper than returning them all the way to Earth.

There are also far less environmental problems with mining the moon. By any reasonable definition, the moon doesn't HAVE an environment to spoil. On the Earth, there are profound cleanup-related issues that are only now beginning to be reflected in the costs of things.

I will say that as far as the amount of legal objections you have to put up with goes, mining on the moon could be as bad as mining on Earth. I'm sure the far left will come up with some reason to sue endlessly.

Jon Acheson