Has the Great 'Moonrush' Begun? (thespacereview.com) 143
This week The Space Review published an essay by retired aerospace engineer Gerald Black, who worked in the aerospace industry for over 40 years and tested various rocket engines, including the ascent stage engine of the Apollo lunar module.
"The Moonrush is now on," he argues "fueled by entrepreneurs dreaming of profits from Earth's nearest neighbor." Leading the Moonrush are a bunch of private companies developing small lunar landers and rovers to explore the Moon. On February 21, the first mission of the Moonrush embarked aboard a Falcon 9 rocket.
The Beresheet lunar lander built by Israel's SpaceIL was launched as a secondary payload, sharing the ride with the Indonesian communications satellite PSN-6. After reaching geostationary transfer orbit, Beresheet and the communications satellite separated from the Falcon 9 launcher. The communications satellite will propel itself to geostationary Earth orbit. Meanwhile, Beresheet is slowly raising its orbit. In early April the spacecraft will enter lunar orbit, then land on the Moon. Israel Aerospace Industries, the company that built the lander for SpaceIL, announced plans in January to partner with the German company OHB to offer a commercial lunar payload delivery service to the European Space Agency.
Black also notes that while Google never awarded its $20 million Lunar X grand prize, many teams are still active, including Astrobotic Technology, Moon Express, ispace inc., TeamIndus and PTScientists -- and that NASA will be awarding $2.6 billion in commercial moon exploration contracts over the next decade under its Commercial Lunar Payload Services program. The first mission under this program could be launched as soon as late this year... Blue Origin is developing a much larger lunar lander called Blue Moon that can land several metric tons of cargo on the Moon. And the German companies OHB and MT Aerospace have tapped Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket and Blue Moon lander to ferry a payload to the Moon in 2023.
Around-the-moon tourism could begin as soon as 2023, Black writes, while Bigelow Aerospace's CEO "is dreaming about establishing facilities on the lunar surface that could host tourists and others." And finally, landers and rovers will soon confirm whether there's accessible water hiding in the moon's perpetually dark craters -- and will hunt for other valuable resources. Rovers that include sample analysis laboratories like the one aboard the Curiosity rover on Mars will provide details about the constituents of the lunar rocks and soil. Deposits of gold, platinum group metals, and rare earth metals are likely to be found. Especially promising in this regard are the numerous impact craters on the Moon. High concentrations of precious metals have been found in craters where asteroids impacted the Earth.
Riches are there to be had, and mining may well become a major industry on the Moon.
"The Moonrush is now on," he argues "fueled by entrepreneurs dreaming of profits from Earth's nearest neighbor." Leading the Moonrush are a bunch of private companies developing small lunar landers and rovers to explore the Moon. On February 21, the first mission of the Moonrush embarked aboard a Falcon 9 rocket.
The Beresheet lunar lander built by Israel's SpaceIL was launched as a secondary payload, sharing the ride with the Indonesian communications satellite PSN-6. After reaching geostationary transfer orbit, Beresheet and the communications satellite separated from the Falcon 9 launcher. The communications satellite will propel itself to geostationary Earth orbit. Meanwhile, Beresheet is slowly raising its orbit. In early April the spacecraft will enter lunar orbit, then land on the Moon. Israel Aerospace Industries, the company that built the lander for SpaceIL, announced plans in January to partner with the German company OHB to offer a commercial lunar payload delivery service to the European Space Agency.
Black also notes that while Google never awarded its $20 million Lunar X grand prize, many teams are still active, including Astrobotic Technology, Moon Express, ispace inc., TeamIndus and PTScientists -- and that NASA will be awarding $2.6 billion in commercial moon exploration contracts over the next decade under its Commercial Lunar Payload Services program. The first mission under this program could be launched as soon as late this year... Blue Origin is developing a much larger lunar lander called Blue Moon that can land several metric tons of cargo on the Moon. And the German companies OHB and MT Aerospace have tapped Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket and Blue Moon lander to ferry a payload to the Moon in 2023.
Around-the-moon tourism could begin as soon as 2023, Black writes, while Bigelow Aerospace's CEO "is dreaming about establishing facilities on the lunar surface that could host tourists and others." And finally, landers and rovers will soon confirm whether there's accessible water hiding in the moon's perpetually dark craters -- and will hunt for other valuable resources. Rovers that include sample analysis laboratories like the one aboard the Curiosity rover on Mars will provide details about the constituents of the lunar rocks and soil. Deposits of gold, platinum group metals, and rare earth metals are likely to be found. Especially promising in this regard are the numerous impact craters on the Moon. High concentrations of precious metals have been found in craters where asteroids impacted the Earth.
Riches are there to be had, and mining may well become a major industry on the Moon.
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Beh (Score:1)
I have heard these predictions a few times in the past 60 years. Nothing ever happened, and since the laws of physics have not changed, nothing will happen.
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"Lasers / Computers / Internet."
are all about information
do you see that maybe going to the moon is maybe different
"shit is all still impossible today"
ah do you mean like the concorde
we have the internet today
so why can't we fly across the atlantic at mach 2.5 like grandad used to
fucking idiot
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No, they're all about physics and engineering. When we first went to the moon we did the calculations on slide rules, and could only send large quantities of data as physical documents.
Electric cars were invented long before gasoline cars - but were abandoned once the internal combustion engine was invented, because we didn't have the battery technology to begin compete with gasoline.
We can't fly across the Atlantic at supersonic speeds because there's not enough of a business case to build and maintain su
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Is it even remotely feasible to send normal-ass moon rocks back to earth for less than $1300/ounce including overhead, let alone gold which would have to be mined/purified/whatever first?
No. But that doesn't matter because investors are fucking stupid. This is what happens when all the wealth is concentrated at the top - the only way for the already-rich to get richer is to scam money out of other rich people. The rest of us just get to sit here thinking "Man, I wish I had the money to scam other rich people with some bullshit scheme."
1. Run ads/press releases about your great new moon venture biz.
2. ???
3. Profit!
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Because people who invest billions in long term projects don’t have the insight about future tech that some random guy on the Internet has.
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Is it even remotely feasible to send normal-ass moon rocks back to earth
No ... and that is why you do NOT bring it back to earth. It is worth far more in space.
Price of a kg of iron on earth: $4.
Price of a kg of iron at GEO: $12,000
Re:MOON GOLD (Score:5, Insightful)
Price of a kg of iron at GEO: $12,000
Value of a kg of iron at GEO: $0.00
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Right - because there's not currently much to do with raw iron in orbit. And why would there be, when it costs $12,000/kg?
But, if lunar iron can be delivered at $10-$100/kg, then it starts being valuable for building orbital structures and interplanetary ships.
And there's no particular reason that it would be particularly expensive to get lunar resources to orbit, or to Earth for that matter. After all, you don't need any rockets or rocket fuel - without an atmosphere you can use a rail gun, sling, or va
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But, if lunar iron can be delivered at $10-$100/kg, then it starts being valuable for building orbital structures and interplanetary ships.
There's a big difference between a piece of raw iron and an interplanetary ship. The difference is about the size of an industrial base, plus pretty much every other element of the periodic table.
And there's no particular reason that it would be particularly expensive to get lunar resources to orbit, or to Earth for that matter. After all, you don't need any rockets or rocket fuel - without an atmosphere you can use a rail gun, sling, or various other moon-mounted launch systems to get stuff into Earth orbit,
No, if you launch something from the Moon, it'll end up in a very elongated and unstable Earth-Lunar orbit, and probably smash into the Moon or Earth after some time. If you want to bring it into an Earth orbit you'll need thrusters to circularize.
you just need to add a heat shield and parachutes
You need an aerodynamically stable shape if you intend to fly throug
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>No, if you launch something from the Moon, it'll end up in a very elongated and unstable Earth-Lunar orbit
It'll almost certainly be an Earth orbit, there's no benefit to putting it in a high enough orbit that it can orbit both (unless it's destined for one of the L-points I suppose), and doing so would require those rockets anyway. And the moon isn't massive enough to make much difference anyway, other than as a destabilizing influence.
Without modification it will be in an orbit that intersects the moo
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Because we're clearly not going to do it on Earth unless the cost is cheaper than the current disaster
If cost is the reason for dirty mining, how do you figure we will ever do it on the Moon, where cost is going to be several orders of magnitude more ?
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Because even if the cost of extraction and refining is orders of magnitude more expensive than mining on Earth (several orders seems unlikely), it's still cheaper once you include the shipping costs to the moon or orbit. At least once you get a good system worked out. It's that early research that's especially expensive, which is why it's mostly governments and magacorporations currently looking to get involved.
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Think about how much material/resources its required to build a space ship from raw lumps of iron. All the processing, all the tooling, etc etc etc. Now think about the cost of moving all the infrastructure of the entire supply chain for that material into orbit, and doing everything without gravity. Now factor in the cost of building on earth, lifting the partial products of the "thing" you actually want to build, and assembling in orbit, and compare that to building the infrastructure in space before y
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The point is rather that you *won't* be transporting all that infrastructure into space - just enough to be able to jump-start on building the rest. Presumably the vast majority of "high tech" materials and components would continue being produced on Earth, but if you can make it out of iron or aluminum with only limited working, you can build it in space. And that probably covers at least 95% of the mass of most equipment, if not far more.
There's already been some really interesting developments in 3D pr
Disaster movie waiting to happen? (Score:1)
So how long before the first Poseidon Adventure/The Martian-style film featuring moon tourists getting stranded...
Rush to What? (Score:5, Insightful)
Deposits of gold, platinum group metals, and rare earth metals are likely to be found.
So? A fact I've always heard is that going to the moon is so expensive, that even if there were endless pure gold nuggets (or diamonds?) littering the surface, then it simply isn't worth the cost to go get them. Has that cost/benefit analysis changed much, if at all?
Tourism is another valid angle, but there's much more to see (much more quickly and safely) in LEO and that hasn't taken off either.
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There is also the little problem that if this stuff could be brought back cheaper than mining it on Earth, the prices would just drop, killing the profits again. The thing is, anything mined on the moon will only be useful for using it on the Moon or in space. We are not quite there yet to be doing that. Maybe in 20...50 years.
Re:Rush to What? (Score:5, Insightful)
That's old, fossil thinking right there. You don't bring it back to Earth now, today, at current launch prices! No way. The point is, you dig it up now, put your name on it, and put shares on a blockchain. That way you can get it onto a market right now, today. And worry about bringing it back in few hundred years, when we need it, and transportation costs are lower.
This is a whole new market, it won't compete with metals that are here on Earth; those need to be used now, before they oxidize, if they were already dug up and processed. This is about building your family's legacy. This is about your personal immortality, as ensured by that same family legacy. You can't buy that with an Earthly investment.
Man, that was good, I wish I had some snake oil to sell at the end of that one.
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Hehehehe....
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But first, you need to stake your claim. And then defend it against claim-jumpers.
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The thing is, anything mined on the moon will only be useful for using it on the Moon or in space.
Which is exactly how any such resources will be used.
The first 'product' from the Moon will be testing of metals refining and element separation that we will be using in more distant places. After that will come uses like supporting structures for huge solar arrays - anything that takes a lot of metal and would be prohibitively expensive to lift from Earth.
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Problem with that scenario is you still need an end product that is profitable. There is no market for huge solar arrays in space.
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There is no market for huge solar arrays in space.
What? Yes, of course there is. There is a market for energy, and putting solar arrays in space makes them more efficient. The power can be broadcast back to inexpensive microwave rectenna arrays here on the planet. The transmission antennas on the power satellites won't be physically capable of focusing to narrow points, which addresses the issue of whether they will cook birds, or can be used to cook cities. (Plus, the major superpowers all have satellite-killing equipment.)
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There is a market for energy, and putting solar arrays in space makes them more efficient.
Yes, but we still have plenty of open space here on Earth, and it's much cheaper to put 2 panels on the ground than 1 panel in orbit.
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Profits are generated by exploiting *people*. If that's what you wanna build our future on then good luck with that, grasshopper.
Wrong, grasshopper. Profits are generated by creating value. There's a little bit of value in sending probes to look at Mars. Just enough to spend a few billion/decade on it. There was military value for the Apollo program.
If you want to spend 100-1000 times as much, you better come up with a good value proposal.
Redo the math, launching from low gravity well (Score:2)
SpaceX currently charges $62 million to launch 50k lb satellites
No, they say it costs $62 million for each Falcon 9 launch.
Form Earth.
So it would be pretty expensive to send gold to the moon. Luckily for people working on this plan, they only need to get gold from the moon back to the Earth - way cheaper since you just have to launch from the moon's gravity well, and basically takes controlled falling back to Earth to recover.
Also of course, SpaceX launch costs are predicted to get much cheaper over time.
Y
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and basically takes controlled falling back to Earth to recover.
You underestimate what it takes to control a fall back to Earth. You would have to package the payload in a capsule. You can either take that capsule all the way to the Moon and back (like in the Apollo program), or you have to do a rendez-vous in LEO, which requires building (or refurbishing) a capsule, launching it to LEO, orbital matching of payload and capsule, and performing autonomous loading procedure. Orbital matching means that your payload needs thrusters and navigation.
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We don't need a highly sophisticated capsule built in Earth's gravity well to drop rocks back into it.
For what purpose, exactly ? Because we like to make a wish when we see their glowing streaks as they vaporize in the night sky ?
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Why bring the resources back in a rocket at all? Build space elevator on the moon, which can be done with existing materials. Use the moon space elevator powered by solar panels to lift the resource out of the gravity well of the moon and use rail gun or something to launch a pack of resources back to the earth. You would only need to send a rocket for supplies that you can't manufacture on the moon.
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It's still a 112,000 km cable (less with counterweight). Building a cable that goes 2-3 times around the Earth.
You still need a fairly strong material to build the cable out of, most of which are based on carbon, which seems in short supply on the Moon.
While possible, it isn't going to happen soon as first you'd need a pretty good industrial base.
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We could put a rail gun system on the moon surface to launch from. Aiming could be a problem though as the only variable you could change would be the force with which the package is launched.
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Rail gun could probably be designed with a couple of degrees of aiming option by varying the magnetic field from side to side. Probably still need small thrusters on the payload. Seems a lot more doable in the short term.
Maybe you should update your knowledge (Score:2)
A fact I've always heard is that going to the moon is so expensive
"A fact" huh?
Don't you think your intel is pretty dated?
That was true when a handful of governments could get you into space. But now clearing the atmosphere has been made far cheaper thanks to companies like SPaceX and Blue Origin, and driving costs cheaper.
Anyone can do the math and see that it might make a lot of sense to try mining valuable minerals from space objects now, and if not certainly within 10 years it will be easily viable.
Tou
You're Just Handwaving (Score:2)
"A fact" huh?
Don't you think your intel is pretty dated?
Yes, hence my question of how much it has changed.
Anyone can do the math and see that it might make a lot of sense to try mining valuable minerals from space objects now, and if not certainly within 10 years it will be easily viable.
False, I cannot do this math, nor does it seem intuitive (even ignoring mining costs) that mining anything on the moon could come close to breaking even.
I was hoping someone might link an xkcd-what-if style analysis of some kind. In another post, you made a good point that the rocket could leave Earth empty and the payload only needs to escape moon's gravity, but that's all.
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False, I cannot do this math, nor does it seem intuitive (even ignoring mining costs) that mining anything on the moon could come close to breaking even.
I concur.
People always seem to ignore the massive infrastructure work that's been done on earth which is necessary to do any sort of large-scale anything. People always seem to ignore maintenance. The need for spare parts. Power. Scale.
And by scale I mean we've explored a couple inches down in a few feet of space on the moon. That's it. Here on earth it's only economical to mine already discovered veins of minerals. On the moon, we don't have any of those. What are we planning to do, just stick hundreds of
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The only hope I can see is finding a iron-nickel meteorite that didn't hit too hard and mining that.
Most people also forget or aren't aware that much of what we mine has been concentrated by water or life. Gold nuggets, comes from veins of gold deposited by super heated water with gold dissolved in it. Much iron was deposited by life or the byproducts of life (oxygen). Carbon, likewise concentrated by life.
I'm not a geologist but I assume a lot of minerals are similar as well as the surface of the Moon down
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Anyone can do the math and see that it might make a lot of sense to try mining valuable minerals from space objects now, and if not certainly within 10 years it will be easily viable.
Oh, you're doing math ? Let's see then. I agree that launching a small satellite on a F9 is more affordable now, but that Israeli lander is still quite far away from doing anything profitable on the Moon.
So, what would it cost for someone to actually mine stuff from the Moon, and send the materials to a buyer ?
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If it was diamonds that would be a game-changer for the space race, because the industrial uses of diamonds are highly constrained by price and availability.
Without the speculative market where people keep sacks of gold in a safe in case the economy collapses, gold would currently have an industrial value of about $350. So it would have to be economical at that price to make it worth investing in something that might crash the market price. But it is a useful metal that would be in much more widespread use
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Diamonds can be manufactured at relatively low cost. We also have huge supplies of them monopolized by DeBeers.
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Lead is also super soft compared to the jacket, dummy.
Depleted uranium is about as dense as gold, is much harder, and also burns.
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If it was diamonds that would be a game-changer for the space race, because the industrial uses of diamonds are highly constrained by price and availability.
No they aren't. Diamond edged tools are cheap and widely available. Often tungsten carbide (or other super-hard ceramics) is better though since they can take higher temperatures and are not subject to oxidation.
Industrial uses of diamonds have not been "highly constrained" by prices for about 60 years when synthetic diamonds replaced natural diamonds for industrial uses because making them was cheaper than mining them. Natural diamonds used industrially today are simply byproducts of gem diamond mining ope
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While all your points are good, you're probably wrong about diamonds on the Moon. They're pretty common in the universe and have been found in meteorites, might even be some big enough to see with the naked eye if you squint. Like most minerals on the Moon, they are not going to be concentrated or even vaguely worth doing something with.
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Platinum and friends would probably be a better bet for something of value from the Moon. Just like gold, it's very doubtful to just be laying around. Other then meteorites, there isn't much in the way of geological processes to concentrate it.
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There is O3, which could be useful for fusion if we ever get that working.
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Do you know how unconcentrated He3 is on the Moon. Better off scoop mining at Saturn or just making it here, if we ever get good enough at fusion to fuse He3.
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By that logic, it would never make sense to dig a mine.
There is large capital expenditures in setting up the system to retrieve the resources. Putting a refining and launching facility on the moon would be a major expenditure. But then, raking up the loot strewn about and lobbing it at Earth would be cheap. Basing the analysis on the launch cost per unit weight and cost of the materials is naive.
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How big do you think a strip mine on the moon would have to be for you to see it on a telescope? What about the naked eye?
You're talking about an excavation 100 or so miles on a side...
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Some humans have 20/20 vision. Some humans have 20/200 vision. Some humans have 20/10 vision. Some humans have much better vision than that.
If you do a strip mine on the front side, people will see it. Unaided. Also: contrast, and shadows. Remember, the Sun is reflecting directly, without having been attenuated by an atmosphere. That totally changes the visibility distance calculations.
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Some humans have 20/20 vision. Some humans have 20/200 vision. Some humans have 20/10 vision. Some humans have much better vision than that.
If you do a strip mine on the front side, people will see it. Unaided. Also: contrast, and shadows. Remember, the Sun is reflecting directly, without having been attenuated by an atmosphere. That totally changes the visibility distance calculations.
The limit of the size of a lunar feature detectable by people with really good vision is about 100 km -- the size of Copernicus crater. It is an an actual feature on the Moon and it is in fact the limit of what can be seen. This is very well established. [skyandtelescope.com] Kepler crater, at half this is invisible to the naked eye. Only people using telescopes can see it (binoculars are just two small telescopes mounted together).
The largest surface mine on Earth is the Hull–Rust–Mahoning Open Pit Iron Mine in Hibb
Of course every country is rushing to the moon (Score:4, Interesting)
As it is the second step of winning the science race. #civilization6
"Moonrush" is at least a decade away... (Score:2)
It's great that a number of companies are reaching out to the moon and organizations like NASA is paying for it but until there is some way to cheaply return materials, the "moonrush" will be a flurry of explorers and then nothing.
The moon gets a lot more exciting when we get cheap titanium and aluminum down to Earth and power from solar cells from the moon's crust. Oh, and maybe in 10 years or so we'll know what to do with He3.
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I don't think that getting anything from the Moon to Earth will be worthwhile anytime soon. Use it there or in space is something else. And we will need to be doing that, because getting stuff from Earth to the moon is extremely expensive and will likely remain so for quite a while.
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Just push it down, and Earth will pay to catch it for you.
Didn't you ever read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress?!?!
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About 3.4 km/sec is the engineering challenge. 2.4 moon's escape velocity 1 moon's orbital velocity. Don't need all of it, but not just a little 'mass driver' (9 iron).
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I wonder how the various nations on the Earth will feel about a mass driver on the Moon.
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The moon gets a lot more exciting when we get cheap titanium and aluminum down to Earth and power from solar cells from the moon's crust. Oh, and maybe in 10 years or so we'll know what to do with He3.
The spot market price for aluminum goes as low as $0.80/lb right now. Titanium costs $25/lb. Even if stacks of aluminum and titanium ingots were sitting on the Moon right now it would never be profitable to ship them back to Earth.
The market for He-3 is tiny, several millions dollars a year, used as a neutron detector. It is an order of magnitude harder to use He-3 as a fusion fuel than deuterium-tritium which has no prospect of ever being a commercially viable source of electricity due to the high capital
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Cheap aluminum from the moon? Do you know that aluminum is one of the most common elements on the earth? The only expensive part is smelting it into a pure metal, since it loves to oxidize so much. Even if you did it on the moon (with that wonderful sunlight 15 days out of each month), the cost to bring it back would be a deal-breaker. Just properly recycle your cans, that's a much more efficient way to get aluminum. And power from solar cells? Sure, buddy, just as soon as we set up that high-voltage power
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There's other uses for 3He, neutron detectors, certain types of powerful magnets for example. 3He is also not that hard to make if needed, irradiate some water and wait.
Business model (Score:3, Insightful)
1. Go to the moon.
2. ???
3. Profit!
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I do wonder if there is enough tourism to even break even.
To become a moon tourist you have to be extremely wealthy, reasonably fit, willing to put up with the somewhat unpleasant journey there and back (you have see a space toilet?) and have some interest in actually going there. That seems like quite a narrow market.
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And it's only a matter of time before there's a terrible accident.
What about Antartica? (Score:2)
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Shouldn't we rape Antarctica First for resources before the moon?
No, because that will pollute Earth, which matters. It doesn't matter if we pollute the moon, because it's a dusty ball of rocks where nothing currently lives.
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No, because that will pollute Earth, which matters. It doesn't matter if we pollute the moon, because it's a dusty ball of rocks where nothing currently lives.
If you're worried about pollution, then design a closed cycle mining operation on Earth that doesn't leave any contamination. Put a roof over the entire mine and refinery, don't spill any water, and fill the mine back up with the original rock.
Still 100 times cheaper than doing the same thing on the Moon.
Billboard (Score:2)
Mining? I don't know about you guys, but I see great potential to use the moon as a huge billboard to place ads. Is there any treaty against that?
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There's not. IIRC about 15 years back some company (Pizza Hut?) considered engraving their name/logo into the Moon, but it was considered too costly to do so.
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t I see great potential to use the moon as a huge billboard to place ads.
It was proposed to the 6+ Corp [wikipedia.org] but they turned it down long ago.
The value in the moon is in cheaper launches. (Score:5, Interesting)
The value in the moon is in cheaper launches. Might be a little late for karma whoring but... bare with me here.
In the 60's we had the technology to build a base on the moon. Hell, we could have even had the technology to produce fuel on the moon. Somewhere there's an interview with Armstrong who said even NASA knew there was water on the moon in the 60's. Water + electricity = hydrogen and oxygen. Very easy to get the 2 turned into some sort of fuel.
The thing we lacked though was money. Beyond money, we lacked things we have today that we just take for granted (looking at the har har funny comments here) We barely had enough fast switching technology to send a 240x160 video stream back to earth. Today we can switch at GHZ, lots of stuff can be fit into that stream. Lots of information. We don't even need it though, we can probably fit plenty in 1tb of solid state storage.
Moving on, we now have advanced processing that recognize conditions and work autonomously. Coupled with 3d printing, we can send smaller robots to the moon to do most of the heavy lifting that would have required humans years ago. There's no atmosphere on the moon, so solar panels will work a lot better up there than here on earth.
So now instead of sending a construction crew to the moon, we can send robots. Robots that will find a suitable place (lava tubes or deep craters) that will build us a base in a somewhat underground area, shielded from cosmic rays and the suns radiation. They can generate their own power, find ice, turn it into breathable oxygen, and eventually fuel for return trips.
I think that's the end game of this moon rush. It's not for tourism, or finding metals. It's to be somewhere that has 1/7th the gravity of the earth, meaning 1/7th the amount of fuel to launch. Future missions, like building a deep space manned craft to go to mars will need the moon. As soon as we get some sort of livable permanent habitat up there, we will start sending other machines up there, start building clean rooms to build processors and RAM up there.
In the beginning, I'd imagine the labor on the moon will be much higher than that on earth, but as the outpost up there evolves, eventually the cost of manufacturing up there will be negated by the cost of launches. That is why we need to be up there. There will never be any reason to bring the resources of the moon back here, but we need to be there to make our eventual trip into the outer solar system possible.
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Back in the late 60s/early 70s NASA took proposals for a Mars mission. Most involved rather large and elaborate craft, to be launched on multiple Saturn 5 rockets and assembled in orbit. IIRC one required 8 Saturn 5s and proposed two ships in a convoy, with a crew of 8 on each.
They looked at using the Moon as a base for launches, but it would have been much more expensive. A lot of new technology would have been needed to live up there and produce fuel, and to launch large vehicles from the surface. The in-
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The moonbase would be much more expensive if you were looking at one trip. Teh benefit of the base comes from using it as a regular port of entry.
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Might be a little late for karma whoring but... bare with me here.
No. Just no. I am not getting bare with you, even if you leave whoring out of the equation.
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"Why do we need to spend trillions of dollars to establish lunar mining? Why, to save billions of dollars on assembling things in orbit!"
Yep... I knew you'd get there eventually. Every starry-eyed space fanboy eventually does
Too bad (Score:2)
We are not running out of anything on Earth except maybe intelligence. I doubt youâ(TM)ll find much of that on the Moon, though bringing back few rocks might significantly improve the average IQ of the planet.
The moon doesn't have much expensive stuff (Score:2)
The Moon was formed from a big collision between the Earth and some other object. Generally speaking, the light stuff was flung further into space, and formed the Moon while the heavy stuff congealed into the Earth as we know it.
As a consequence, the Moon has density of 3.5 grams/cc while the Earth has 5.5 g/cc. All the heavy, expensive stuff is on the Earth. So mining operations on the Moon would not find a lot of iron and valuable heavier metals. Silicates and the like, sure.
Re: (Score:2)
All the heavy, expensive stuff is in the Earth
Fixed that for you.
Re: (Score:1)
Betteridge's Law (Score:2)
Short answer: nope!
Longer answer: Gold rushes start when someone finds an easily and cheaply accessible lode of commercially valuable ore... And a bunch of other people rush in to get their piece of the action. Almost always, they're short lived and the only people who actually make money are the folks selling supplies to would-be miners.
There is no material on the Lunar surface that's easily and cheaply available - even if you use it on orbit rather than returning it to Earth.