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Moon

Europe Plans To Drill the Moon For Oxygen and Water by 2025 (fortune.com) 112

Posted by msmash from the next-on-the-agenda dept.
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.
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Europe Plans To Drill the Moon For Oxygen and Water by 2025 More

Europe Plans To Drill the Moon For Oxygen and Water by 2025

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  • What about the POLAR bears on the moon?

  • Only five years left (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I guess they better get busy or this won't happen.

  • Oh no, have they heard the tale of "The Time Machine" [imdb.com]
    Very much bad-ness has been predicted, yes?
    Moon cracks...smash becomes.

    • And the lesson is - don't try mining using explosives powerful enough to accelerate half the planet to escape velocity. (Yeah, they actually claimed "screwed up the orbit" - which is even worse. For the moon to break up due to orbital issues, you'd need to bring it from 384,399km from the Earth's center, to within the Earth-Moon Roche Limit of 9,492 km. Needless to say the moon would look a LOT bigger, and the average gravitational influence on Earth would be about 1,500x greater. Much more when directl

  • Big mistake. They should have gone with SpaceX. They have a new stainless steel rocket in development already. Plus they have the lowest launch costs in the world. Yes, I live in the same fantasy land as the ESA does.

    • Big mistake. They should have gone with SpaceX. They have a new stainless steel rocket in development already. Plus they have the lowest launch costs in the world. Yes, I live in the same fantasy land as the ESA does.

      Ariane 6 will have a reusable 1st stage at smaller performance penalty than Falcon 9. I salute anybody who chooses to compete instead of capitulating. Middle finger to Elon Musk, if he wants to create a SpaceX mono culture in the launch industry he's going to have to fight for it.

      • I hope that SX does have to fight for it. However, Airiane 6 is not a competitor to either F9,FH, or BFR.
      • Yeah, but will it be built from stainless steel? Doubtful!

      • > 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.

      • Ariane 6 will have a reusable 1st stage at smaller performance penalty than Falcon 9.

        Perhaps, in theory, in another decade. It's only been the last few months that Roussel has made rumblings about reusability whereas Alain Charmeau was very open about Ariane 6 being a jobs program (much like the American SLS) and that reusability did not figure anywhere into that. Current plans for any sort of reusability of the Prometheus engine are not on the table till 2030 AFAIK.

      • Ariane 6 will have a reusable 1st stage

        When, in 2040?

        at smaller performance penalty than Falcon 9

        Math doesn't check out. Ariane stages at near orbital velocity, meaning that any recovery system is going to both involve significant TPS *and* have a 1:1 payload loss from the addition of the recovery system. The low staging velocity of F9 is what makes its performance losses reasonable.

    • I think it is a great idea to drill for oxygen and stuff on the moon. What keeps me from talking more about the ESA on the moon is that from my view in my cave, one needs to have a presence on the moon in order to mine its resources. Maybe the ESA might want to do something simple like maybe put a LEM on the moon?

  • Much Better Link Here (Score:5, Informative)

    by careysub ( 976506 ) on Wednesday January 23, 2019 @11:07AM (#58008264)

    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 [spacenews.com].

    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.

  • Robots donâ(TM)t need water and air or paychecks. Thereâ(TM)s probably more valuable things to mine and ship back to earth like energy and metals. They would only be replaced by computers and robots.

    • Robots donÃ(TM)t need water and air or paychecks. ThereÃ(TM)s probably more valuable things to mine and ship back to earth like energy and metals. They would only be replaced by computers and robots.

      Unless we find that we can cheaply mine He3, there's nothing on the moon that is worth bringing back to earth. It would make more sense to mine asteroids. The common criticism of that plan is that we don't know how to do that yet, but we don't know how to mine the moon yet, either.

      • Bringing back to the Earth? Not so much. Using in space though? Lots. The moon is estimated to be 60% oxygen by mass, with plenty of iron, titanium, carbon and other useful ores* . And gigatons of radiation shielding (aka rock) for the easy taking. Essentially it's a MASSIVE asteroid (20x the combined mass of the entire asteroid belt) already captured in Earth orbit where it's most useful for developing Earth orbit.

        Mining rare elements from asteroids will likely be far more profitable for Earth-based e

        • The moon is estimated to be 60% oxygen by mass, with plenty of iron, titanium, carbon and other useful ores

          Correct in spirit but not in detail. We don't know much about internal Lunar composition other than its mean density, in any case it's inaccessible so not at all interesting in terms of mining. The crustal composition is better know, about 40% oxygen, not 60% as you suggested. Water ice is known to exist on the surface at the poles and has been found in returned samples at concentrations in the .1% range, meaning that significant hydrogen does exist on the moon, but significant work is required to access it

    • Robots donâ(TM)t need water and air or paychecks.

      But they do need power, maintenance and repair.

    • Rockets may make good use of oxygen and hydrogen obtained by water electrolysis. Water may be found as subsurface ice in deep craters in the moon polar regions.
      So the moon polar craters could be ideal places to start solar system deep exploration. On the polar crater rims sunlight is almost constant, good for producing electricity on industrial scale. The moon weak gravity requires much smaller rockets for reaching other solar system bodies than on the earth, since the minimum required energy is lower by

  • The west needs to invest into robots that can do this on the moon, mars, and esp on earth. We have a need of robots to lower labor and access difficult to reach places at lower costs.

  • ... and the Moon.

    Dumb bastards. The US could have been a contendah. STELLA!!!

    Had Waxahachie gone through, the world's leading scientists would be gathered in Texas. Imagine all the ancillary economic benefits.

    We would have mining colonies on the Moon manufacturing fuel and launching rockets from 1/6th gravity.

    Fuck that.

    Let's create jobs with the goddam war machine, right?

  • So, 28 days? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    A moon year, get it? HA HA HA I'm so funny! Please validate my existence *sob*

  • Aren't the rights to the moon's resources still up in the air? I haven't looked very closely at the space treaties out there, and who has agreed to what, but I thought the general idea was that no one could claim ownership of the moon. Looks like we need a war. USA! USA!

  • Thanks *so* much, Republican President Nixon, for canceling the rest of the Apollo program, and thanks, also, to St. Ronnie Raygun for lack of support for anything beyond low earth orbit. Then there were the GOP members of Congress in the early/mid-nineties who nearly killed the project to build the ISS.

    The GOP has hated civilian space, just like they hate science.

    • So, you're trying your best to imply that the Democrats are very much in favour of civilian space?

      Is there any evidence of that?

      Especially given the Democrat control of Congress during Nixon's terms, and their control of the House for all of Reagan's terms (and the Senate for part of Reagan's terms).

      As well as their control of Congress during the early/mid-nineties (depending on how one counts "mid 90s" of course. - they had control till '95, but lost it in the mid-terms then - thanks to Clinton)....

      You

  • Both Ariane 62 and Ariane 64 are optimized to launch commercial payload in Low Earth Orbit. A bit light for the moon; That is if ArianeGroup succeed to build them as planned. Ariane 5 is still the launcher that sends the most commercial payloads for the moments (do not forget it can launch 2 satellites in one go). But its days are numbered.

    Besides, ArianeGroup builds rockets. Arianespace commercializes them along other rockets like VEGA or the Russian Soyouz Fregat. The ESA is the European Space agency and

  • And put up a parking lot.

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