The Prospects For Lunar Mining

MarkWhittington writes "With the discovery of vast amounts of water on the Moon, some frozen in the shadows of craters at the Lunar poles and some chemically bonded with the regolith, interest in lunar mining has arisen among commercial space entrepreneurs. Paul Spudis, a lunar geologist, has suggested a plan to return to the Moon, which features, among other things, robotic resource extraction and the deployment of space-based fuel depots using lunar water even before the first human explorers return to the lunar surface. But Mike Wall, writing in Space.com, suggests that there are a number of legal as well as technical issues involved in setting up lunar mining operations."

Re:Energy requirements?

[painandgreed]

I'm surprised the most obvious challenge in going to the moon isn't mentioned in the article: that it takes a huge amount of energy to get to the moon and then to get back. I mean what are we going to mine that has so much value? Water? Energy production uses a huge amount of water. Going to the moon for some water is counter productive.

We would not be mining the moon for anything that would go back down the gravity well to Earth. We would be mining it for resources for space exploration and operations instead of mining Earth for them. The moon, being smaller has a much smaller cost of getting materials into orbit. If we need a sufficient amount of those materials, it becomes cheaper to ship a mining operation from Earth to the moon and then those materials to space than to ship all the materials straight from Earth. Water is the main resource people are talking about and to reach that break even point, we'd need megatons of the stuff. The only operations that might being to need that much resources from the moon would be large scale habitation or perhaps a trip to Mars. in short, out side of pure science, there will not be any need to mine the moon till there is already a great deal of activity in space at which point mining the moon will just be a cost cutting method.

Re:Energy requirements?

[mibe]

Helium-2, rare earths, and who says we necessarily need to send everything back to Earth?

Re:Energy requirements?

[moteyalpha]

It would seem that the dark and light sides of the moon comprises a heat engine. For example, a tube which was placed about the pole and filled with gas, would expand in areas exposed to the sun and contract away from the sun in a continuous cycle, much like the engine that powers the Earths weather. It would this would be extensible and provide the local energy by turbine to operate some robotic process.

Re:Regolith?

[Yvanhoe]

There is no known material worth the expense of mining it on the moon

It would be about time that the media talk a bit more loudly about the uranium deposits found on the moon.
Is it worth the expense vs. mining on earth ? Yes, because it allows a use that would otherwise need uranium to be lifted out of the earth's gravity well : build a refinery that produces fuel for Orion-style ships.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion) [wikipedia.org]

Or even that beam power back to earth without having us manage nuclear wastes.

Re:Energy requirements?

[Grishnakh]

Exactly, it's just like the "Dark Ages". They were called that not because they were horrible, but because almost no records were kept at the time, so we have very very little historical knowledge of that period. Of course, this probably means it was a shitty time to live too, but we can't know for sure because of the lack of records.