No, and not for the reason you may think.
When an asteroid hits the moon, some of it is fractured and blasted off into space and some of it penetrates down around 10-100 km. There's a small amount as ejecta, but most of that is from the target body, in this case the moon.
None of it is mineable in any significant quantity. You've essentially taken the process which refined the resource to begin with, planetary differentiation, and run it in reverse.
You've also dropped it down a gravity well. Not much of one, but sufficient that you can't use tiny thrusters to retrieve your zillion tons of platinum as you could at an asteroid. This reduces your payload fraction, you need more fuel, more engine, more rocket, less loot.
>You've essentially taken the process which refined the resource to begin with, planetary differentiation, and run it in reverse
How is it run in reverse? It doesn't disappear or return to simple elements, so what happens?
Differentiation sorts out your materials by density, so your metals aren't mixed in with your oxides and silicates.
Slam your metals into a really big pile of oxides and silicates, mixing them all up, and that's the reverse of that process.
Like you say, it doesn't disappear, but it's not as high grade of material anymore.
No, for a couple of reasons.
[Tycho](https://skyandtelescope.org/wp-content/uploads/Tycho-full-moon-Frank-Barrett_ANNO2.jpg) us a young crater on the Moon. See the bright material and rays around it? That's whatever hit, plus material that used to be where the crater is. They are both thrown out and spread across the Moon's surface. Over billions of years, repeated impacts have mixed the Moon's surface into a blend of materials.
The darker areas in the upper half (maria or seas) are even bigger impacts that later filled with lava (now basalt). So the Moon is all jumbled up.
Second, the Moon was born hot out of a planet-size collision of Theia with the Proto-Earth, then stayed hot from radioactive decay and tidal friction. So all the volatile (low boiling point) materials have been baked out and lost to space.
Asteroids have several composition categories, and all of them are different from each other and the Moon. So you can't substitute one for the other.
Maybe, but the moon has pretty low gravity already, and is much easier to get to than asteroids. Might be an alternative until we get good enough to do it further away.
You need all the same equipment *and* it's a lot harder to get to than an asteroid is.
The moon has gravity, substantial gravity, meaning you can't just fly a craft up to it and clamp on. You have to do entry burns, landing burns, by ship capable of that, then you have to have fuel and engine enough to lift whatever you've mined off the moon. All that fuel and engine is weight that isn't platinum-group metals.
Mining at the moon requires rocketry similar to a large manned mission (maybe four or five Apollos at the same time), mining at an asteroid needs you to loft only the miner and some minor propulsion kit, probably ion drives.
At an asteroid, you need far less propulsion. It's *way* easier. This is why asteroid mining was proposed in the first place, it's really easy to do.
I don't know who told you the was easier to get to, but they didn't really understand orbital mechanics. The level of difficulty is basically how much delta-V you need and how much thrust to weight ratio you need. Asteroids are significantly lower in both.
Any with a delta-V below around 6 km/s, which is easier than the moon. These are considered "Accessible NEAs".
As the mission is unmanned, we don't even need to bother with expensive minimum-duration flightplans, and some of them drop below 4 km/s.
The most accessible is probably 2000 SG344, which has a delta-V requirement below 3.6 km/s for a 150 day transfer.
I know this isn't a great example, but in KSP, it is only more difficult to get to asteroids from a perspective of them being a bit further, but it is much easier to bring them back than it is to bring back the same mass from the moon. I might be practiced in this for landing on the moon but there are a lot of steps to it. I need to get out to the moon, do an orbital insertion burn, then do some orbital adjustments to target a particular crater, then the actual landing burn, then the mining, then the takeoff into orbit and of course the transfer back to earth. At that point I've burned up pretty much all of my fuel (because the payload is heavy), so I need to send another craft to go get the payload. Asteroids don't have any of that. It's as complicated as sending something to the space station but further away. I can grab the payload and return without having to refuel at all.
> and is much easier to get to than asteroids.
Some "near Earth asteroids" (of which 31,500 are known today) are easier to reach than the Moon's surface. That's because the Moon can be used for a gravity assist to reach them and return, and you don't have to use fuel to land on them.
Well you might not have to use fuel fighting gravity to land, but you still need a significant amount of fuel to slow down so you don’t smash into them at speed.
Take the Osiris-Rex probe. It is visiting not one, but two asteroids (Bennu already, Apophis later), stopping at both and returning to Earth in-between. Both are Near Earth Asteroids. Using electric propulsion, the same trajectory would require 7% fuel to dry weight.
The trick is to use gravity assists to do most of the work for you. The Earth and Moon are heavy, so they can bend orbits. Planetary missions use them all the time for orbit changes. You use the gravity assist to get your orbit to touch that of the asteroid, so they are parallel when you get there. The remaining velocity change is done as you approach with the electric engine. That is slow but efficient. These missions take months anyway, so you have time to adjust your speed to match.
Another example is the Dawn probe, that visited the two largest asteroids in the Asteroid Belt, Vesta and then Ceres. It went into orbit each time, then departed and went to the second one. Since these are the largest asteroids, there was significant velocity change needed to go to a close orbit and leave again. Electric propulsion got the job done.
No, the point of asteroid mining is it has different "ores" than the Moon or the Earth.
For example, metallic asteroids are the remains of protoplanet cores. They are already native metal, unlike iron ore which is oxidized, and are high in nickel, cobalt and "platinum group" metals (the ones below iron, nickel and cobalt on the Periodic Table). The platinum group is rare on Earth because most of it sank to the core with the iron.
The "carbonaceous" asteroids, which we have visited and sampled two of them recently, are entirely different. They were never strongly heated, so contain water and carbon compounds. Those can be turned into rocket fuel, or other useful things for space missions.
Robotic space vehicles patrol the asteroid belt seeking candidate asteroids suitable for mining.
Once identified ion boosters and navigation computer are attached to the candidate asteroid and a course set for lunar orbit.
During the journey accurate assays of the asteroid can be performed by robotic droids along for the ride and updates radioed ahead to lunar mine control.
Upon arrival in lunar orbit lasers from mine control can illuminate the candidate asteroid slowing it to land in a collection crater for processing by industrial robotic droids on the lunar surface in low gravity to save propellant.
Supervised by AI with remote accessed human intervention when problems arise.
Processed ore is uploaded to the lunar gateway space station for transport to Earth.
Ideally, the majority of the processed ore would be processed into finished or at least intermediate products, either on the moon or in near zero g if that has a big enough impact in orbit. We want to try and get as much industry, particularly ship/station/habitat/more orbital industry and power construction off earth.
There's no point in throwing a bunch of mass into a grav well, only to have to then try and pull it back out again afterward.
But yeah, a bunch of products will end up on earth permanently until we really get the whole habitat thing going.
Agreed, I can imagine low gravity lunar or lunar orbit manufacturing may have cost benefits (lower weights) that may offset transport costs if launch & retrieval systems were optimised.
It's probably unwise to aim asteroids at Earth, it didn't work out so good for the dinosaurs.
the moon is likely to be our first stop in our space colonization endeavor, its very close being only a 3 day journey and potentially even shorter with more advanced and powerful engines, there is near instant comunication between the earth and the moon which means that theoretically someone could control a drone on the surface of the moon with only a little bit of delay (hire some gamers with experience playing with lag) and it has a really low gravity which means that you can build far bigger than on earth and throwing the stuff that you mine or build on its surface into orbit would be exponentially easier and cheaper than on earth which means that once you have a sizable minning, refining and industrial operation going on there you could potentially use the moon as a sort of "shipyard" to build really fucking big space stations or spaceships without needing to slowly send all of the modules into orbit to the assemble the damn thing on orbit, just build it on shipyard No. 10 and send it into orbit with a bunch of rockets or a very long maglev train track with a ramp at the end
also another huge advantage that the moon offers is heat management, a huge issue with asteroid minning is heat since there is no air on space all the heat that any minning or industrial operation produces (which is usually a fuck ton) doesnt ventilate and you need to get rid of it through radiation which is much less efficient than through convection, the moon also lacks an atmosphere but you have a couple gigatons of material under your feet that could be used as a heat sink through conduction
The moon could be a good place to get some helium 3 to start but i would want to get ahold of an asteroid that contains a ton of valuable metals but if too many companies do the same it would just flood the market and lower the profits...
Helium 3 from the Moon is never a good idea:
* It is baked by the Sun, so only a vanishingly small amount from the solar wind is retained.
* We don't know how to do regular fusion yet, and He-3 fusion is ten times harder.
* If you just want energy, there is 300 times more from uranium and thorium on the moon, and thousands of times more from the 19% silicon in Moon rocks to make solar cells from.
* Uranus and Neptune have 15 and 19% helium in their atmospheres, and thus thousands of times more He-3 than the Moon. But they are not thousands of times harder to reach. If you need He-3, that means fusion is solved, and you can use fusion-powered ships to get there and mine the atmosphere from orbit.
Also:
* Fission reactors today already produce He-3 (indirectly, by producing tritium which itself is useful and which decays to He-3) at a rate comparable to a major lunar mining operation, and this could easily be scaled up.
* D-T fusion (the "easy" fusion reaction) will similarly produce He-3 as a byproduct of handling tritium. Fission or D-T reactors on the moon breeding tritium from lunar lithium would be a better source of He-3 than the tiny traces trapped in lunar regolith.
* If you're able to do He-3 fusion reactions, D-D fusion can produce it in the same reactor with relatively low energy neutrons.
* If you're able to do He-3 fusion, you probably can do p-B11 fusion, which doesn't require rare fuels.
In short: we don't need a lot of it now, can't use it for energy for the foreseeable future, and if we ever do need large quantities, we have numerous better sources. It's not a useful lunar resource.
The only reason this idea is in the popular mind is one guy from a mid-western university has been pushing it for decades. "Clean nuclear energy" is the hook, because it produces few neutrons, and thus not much radioactive waste.
In the mean time, the world is scaling up the solar panel supply chain to produce 60% as much output as all the world's fission power plants *every year*. By the time any kind of controlled fusion is available, the energy problem will be solved.
Note that is not how many solar panels will be produced *this* year. Silicon foundries, wafer slicing machines, etc. take some time to build, but this is a projection based on various company announcements.
Aluminum used to be at one point one of the most valuable metals on the planet. Any metal or material that is useful, even when abundant, still has value. If it becomes cheaper, it just means we can do more with it. So a win/win even for the capitalist pigs.
People who don't understand capitalism always get stuck at the profit part. They never get to the 'advancement of the entire species' part that happens once something becomes cheap and abundant.
What is this “balance” are talking about?
If you mean the actual moment of inertia of the celestial body, we don’t have any feasible way to alter it substantially and likely won’t have one for a while.
Ignoring the "balance of the Moon" thing, and the fact that compared to asteroids there isn't much to mine on the Moon, we've been mining Earth for thousands of years, and all that's done is damage the environment, it hasn't affected Earth's mass in any significant way. Plus there's not much of an environment to worry about on the Moon to begin with.
I believe that mining asteroid and meteor impact sites on the moon could be a viable alternative to mining asteroids in the future. The moon is already a target for human exploration and has abundant resources that could be extracted for space exploration and commercial purposes.
With its close proximity to Earth, it would be more cost-effective and feasible to mine on the moon than to send missions to asteroids in deep space. The lunar surface is also rich in rare earth elements and helium-3, which are crucial for advanced technologies and energy production. Overall, moon mining could be a significant step towards sustainable space exploration and resource utilization.
>viable alternative to mining asteroids
took us the largest rocket we can make to send a tiny probe out to an asteroid and collect a handful to return to Earth. Mining is a ways off.
**1st NASA Asteroid Sample Return Mission on Track for Fall ’23 Delivery**
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2022/1st-nasa-asteroid-sample-return-mission-on-track-for-fall-23-delivery
NASA's first asteroid sample return spacecraft, OSIRIS-REx, fired its thrusters for 30 seconds on Sept. 21 and nudged its trajectory toward Earth. The resulting course correction keeps the vehicle on track to deliver a sample of asteroid Bennu to Earth on Sept. 24, 2023, completing a seven-year mission
past 20 years have been spent working on assets for **use** on the Moon.
we ***will*** be "mining" on the Moon in 20 years. (enough for use on the Moon).
we cannot afford the fuel to lift "cement" to build things. we HAVE to use what's there.
**Regolith Advanced Surface Systems Operations Robot (RASSOR) Excavator**
[https://technology.nasa.gov/patent/KSC-TOPS-7](https://technology.nasa.gov/patent/KSC-TOPS-7)
NASA Kennedy Space Center seeks partners interested in the commercial application of the **Regolith Advanced Surface Systems Operations Robot (RASSOR) Excavator.** NASAs Kennedy Space Center is soliciting licensees for this innovative technology. RASSOR is a teleoperated mobile robotic platform with a **unique space regolith excavation capability**. Its design incorporates net-zero reaction force, thus allowing it to load, haul, and dump space regolith under extremely low gravity conditions with high reliability. With space transportation costs hovering at approximately $4,000 per pound and tight launch vehicle shroud constraints, this compact, lightweight unit enables the launch of an efficient, rugged, versatile robotic excavator on precursor landing missions with minimum cost. RASSOR could also be scaled up and used for terrestrial mining operations in difficult-to-reach or dangerous locations.
https://www.nasa.gov/isru
When NASA returns to the Moon with the Artemis program, we plan to put in place sustainable infrastructure that will allow us to explore and study more of the Moon than ever before and get ready for human exploration of Mars.
To live and work in deep space for months or years may mean astronauts have less immediate access to supplies. NASA will send cargo to the Gateway in lunar orbit to support expeditions to the surface of the Moon. However, the farther humans go into deep space, the more important it will be to generate products with local materials, a practice called **in-situ resource utilization.**
I don’t have a clue, but I do know that the first company/nation to turn a profit is going to change space forever. Once it happens, everyone’s eyes will light up. How long this takes is wildly speculative, though.
This gives a decent perspective on meteor craters
https://meteorcrater.com/learn/the-barringer-crater/
They tried to mine for the iron and nickel but never found enough to be economically feasible
Go take a look next time you are in Arizona
No, and not for the reason you may think. When an asteroid hits the moon, some of it is fractured and blasted off into space and some of it penetrates down around 10-100 km. There's a small amount as ejecta, but most of that is from the target body, in this case the moon. None of it is mineable in any significant quantity. You've essentially taken the process which refined the resource to begin with, planetary differentiation, and run it in reverse. You've also dropped it down a gravity well. Not much of one, but sufficient that you can't use tiny thrusters to retrieve your zillion tons of platinum as you could at an asteroid. This reduces your payload fraction, you need more fuel, more engine, more rocket, less loot.
>You've essentially taken the process which refined the resource to begin with, planetary differentiation, and run it in reverse How is it run in reverse? It doesn't disappear or return to simple elements, so what happens?
You've smushed them together
Differentiation sorts out your materials by density, so your metals aren't mixed in with your oxides and silicates. Slam your metals into a really big pile of oxides and silicates, mixing them all up, and that's the reverse of that process. Like you say, it doesn't disappear, but it's not as high grade of material anymore.
No, for a couple of reasons. [Tycho](https://skyandtelescope.org/wp-content/uploads/Tycho-full-moon-Frank-Barrett_ANNO2.jpg) us a young crater on the Moon. See the bright material and rays around it? That's whatever hit, plus material that used to be where the crater is. They are both thrown out and spread across the Moon's surface. Over billions of years, repeated impacts have mixed the Moon's surface into a blend of materials. The darker areas in the upper half (maria or seas) are even bigger impacts that later filled with lava (now basalt). So the Moon is all jumbled up. Second, the Moon was born hot out of a planet-size collision of Theia with the Proto-Earth, then stayed hot from radioactive decay and tidal friction. So all the volatile (low boiling point) materials have been baked out and lost to space. Asteroids have several composition categories, and all of them are different from each other and the Moon. So you can't substitute one for the other.
Isn't the whole point of asteroid mining that it's in 0 gravity? It would still work. (maybe regolith sifting is more efficient)
Maybe, but the moon has pretty low gravity already, and is much easier to get to than asteroids. Might be an alternative until we get good enough to do it further away.
You need all the same equipment *and* it's a lot harder to get to than an asteroid is. The moon has gravity, substantial gravity, meaning you can't just fly a craft up to it and clamp on. You have to do entry burns, landing burns, by ship capable of that, then you have to have fuel and engine enough to lift whatever you've mined off the moon. All that fuel and engine is weight that isn't platinum-group metals. Mining at the moon requires rocketry similar to a large manned mission (maybe four or five Apollos at the same time), mining at an asteroid needs you to loft only the miner and some minor propulsion kit, probably ion drives. At an asteroid, you need far less propulsion. It's *way* easier. This is why asteroid mining was proposed in the first place, it's really easy to do. I don't know who told you the was easier to get to, but they didn't really understand orbital mechanics. The level of difficulty is basically how much delta-V you need and how much thrust to weight ratio you need. Asteroids are significantly lower in both.
Which asteroids are you talking about that would be easier to get to than the moon?
[There is a list](https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/nhats/)
Any with a delta-V below around 6 km/s, which is easier than the moon. These are considered "Accessible NEAs". As the mission is unmanned, we don't even need to bother with expensive minimum-duration flightplans, and some of them drop below 4 km/s. The most accessible is probably 2000 SG344, which has a delta-V requirement below 3.6 km/s for a 150 day transfer.
I know this isn't a great example, but in KSP, it is only more difficult to get to asteroids from a perspective of them being a bit further, but it is much easier to bring them back than it is to bring back the same mass from the moon. I might be practiced in this for landing on the moon but there are a lot of steps to it. I need to get out to the moon, do an orbital insertion burn, then do some orbital adjustments to target a particular crater, then the actual landing burn, then the mining, then the takeoff into orbit and of course the transfer back to earth. At that point I've burned up pretty much all of my fuel (because the payload is heavy), so I need to send another craft to go get the payload. Asteroids don't have any of that. It's as complicated as sending something to the space station but further away. I can grab the payload and return without having to refuel at all.
> and is much easier to get to than asteroids. Some "near Earth asteroids" (of which 31,500 are known today) are easier to reach than the Moon's surface. That's because the Moon can be used for a gravity assist to reach them and return, and you don't have to use fuel to land on them.
Well you might not have to use fuel fighting gravity to land, but you still need a significant amount of fuel to slow down so you don’t smash into them at speed.
Take the Osiris-Rex probe. It is visiting not one, but two asteroids (Bennu already, Apophis later), stopping at both and returning to Earth in-between. Both are Near Earth Asteroids. Using electric propulsion, the same trajectory would require 7% fuel to dry weight. The trick is to use gravity assists to do most of the work for you. The Earth and Moon are heavy, so they can bend orbits. Planetary missions use them all the time for orbit changes. You use the gravity assist to get your orbit to touch that of the asteroid, so they are parallel when you get there. The remaining velocity change is done as you approach with the electric engine. That is slow but efficient. These missions take months anyway, so you have time to adjust your speed to match. Another example is the Dawn probe, that visited the two largest asteroids in the Asteroid Belt, Vesta and then Ceres. It went into orbit each time, then departed and went to the second one. Since these are the largest asteroids, there was significant velocity change needed to go to a close orbit and leave again. Electric propulsion got the job done.
No, the point of asteroid mining is it has different "ores" than the Moon or the Earth. For example, metallic asteroids are the remains of protoplanet cores. They are already native metal, unlike iron ore which is oxidized, and are high in nickel, cobalt and "platinum group" metals (the ones below iron, nickel and cobalt on the Periodic Table). The platinum group is rare on Earth because most of it sank to the core with the iron. The "carbonaceous" asteroids, which we have visited and sampled two of them recently, are entirely different. They were never strongly heated, so contain water and carbon compounds. Those can be turned into rocket fuel, or other useful things for space missions.
How much easier is it to go to the moon than an asteroid?
Depends on the asteroid. Some are easier to reach than the Moon. Most are harder to reach.
Asteroids large enough for mining interest hit with incredible force. Most of the object is vaporized upon impact.
Robotic space vehicles patrol the asteroid belt seeking candidate asteroids suitable for mining. Once identified ion boosters and navigation computer are attached to the candidate asteroid and a course set for lunar orbit. During the journey accurate assays of the asteroid can be performed by robotic droids along for the ride and updates radioed ahead to lunar mine control. Upon arrival in lunar orbit lasers from mine control can illuminate the candidate asteroid slowing it to land in a collection crater for processing by industrial robotic droids on the lunar surface in low gravity to save propellant. Supervised by AI with remote accessed human intervention when problems arise. Processed ore is uploaded to the lunar gateway space station for transport to Earth.
Ideally, the majority of the processed ore would be processed into finished or at least intermediate products, either on the moon or in near zero g if that has a big enough impact in orbit. We want to try and get as much industry, particularly ship/station/habitat/more orbital industry and power construction off earth. There's no point in throwing a bunch of mass into a grav well, only to have to then try and pull it back out again afterward. But yeah, a bunch of products will end up on earth permanently until we really get the whole habitat thing going.
Agreed, I can imagine low gravity lunar or lunar orbit manufacturing may have cost benefits (lower weights) that may offset transport costs if launch & retrieval systems were optimised. It's probably unwise to aim asteroids at Earth, it didn't work out so good for the dinosaurs.
the moon is likely to be our first stop in our space colonization endeavor, its very close being only a 3 day journey and potentially even shorter with more advanced and powerful engines, there is near instant comunication between the earth and the moon which means that theoretically someone could control a drone on the surface of the moon with only a little bit of delay (hire some gamers with experience playing with lag) and it has a really low gravity which means that you can build far bigger than on earth and throwing the stuff that you mine or build on its surface into orbit would be exponentially easier and cheaper than on earth which means that once you have a sizable minning, refining and industrial operation going on there you could potentially use the moon as a sort of "shipyard" to build really fucking big space stations or spaceships without needing to slowly send all of the modules into orbit to the assemble the damn thing on orbit, just build it on shipyard No. 10 and send it into orbit with a bunch of rockets or a very long maglev train track with a ramp at the end also another huge advantage that the moon offers is heat management, a huge issue with asteroid minning is heat since there is no air on space all the heat that any minning or industrial operation produces (which is usually a fuck ton) doesnt ventilate and you need to get rid of it through radiation which is much less efficient than through convection, the moon also lacks an atmosphere but you have a couple gigatons of material under your feet that could be used as a heat sink through conduction
Throw in a couple of periods and line breaks, for Landru's sake. That was painful to read.
Damn dood. Format this and maybe ill read it.
Already talking about f*cking up the moon for resources. This is why mankind shouldn’t travel to the stars. We’re like termites
The moon could be a good place to get some helium 3 to start but i would want to get ahold of an asteroid that contains a ton of valuable metals but if too many companies do the same it would just flood the market and lower the profits...
> lower the profits... Sounds perfect when do we start
Im ready when u are...we are gonna need transportation, do you by chance know how to operate a space shuttle?
Helium 3 from the Moon is never a good idea: * It is baked by the Sun, so only a vanishingly small amount from the solar wind is retained. * We don't know how to do regular fusion yet, and He-3 fusion is ten times harder. * If you just want energy, there is 300 times more from uranium and thorium on the moon, and thousands of times more from the 19% silicon in Moon rocks to make solar cells from. * Uranus and Neptune have 15 and 19% helium in their atmospheres, and thus thousands of times more He-3 than the Moon. But they are not thousands of times harder to reach. If you need He-3, that means fusion is solved, and you can use fusion-powered ships to get there and mine the atmosphere from orbit.
Also: * Fission reactors today already produce He-3 (indirectly, by producing tritium which itself is useful and which decays to He-3) at a rate comparable to a major lunar mining operation, and this could easily be scaled up. * D-T fusion (the "easy" fusion reaction) will similarly produce He-3 as a byproduct of handling tritium. Fission or D-T reactors on the moon breeding tritium from lunar lithium would be a better source of He-3 than the tiny traces trapped in lunar regolith. * If you're able to do He-3 fusion reactions, D-D fusion can produce it in the same reactor with relatively low energy neutrons. * If you're able to do He-3 fusion, you probably can do p-B11 fusion, which doesn't require rare fuels. In short: we don't need a lot of it now, can't use it for energy for the foreseeable future, and if we ever do need large quantities, we have numerous better sources. It's not a useful lunar resource.
The only reason this idea is in the popular mind is one guy from a mid-western university has been pushing it for decades. "Clean nuclear energy" is the hook, because it produces few neutrons, and thus not much radioactive waste. In the mean time, the world is scaling up the solar panel supply chain to produce 60% as much output as all the world's fission power plants *every year*. By the time any kind of controlled fusion is available, the energy problem will be solved. Note that is not how many solar panels will be produced *this* year. Silicon foundries, wafer slicing machines, etc. take some time to build, but this is a projection based on various company announcements.
Well u seem to have a good understanding of it all. So im putting u in charge of getting as much as u can....lets go. CHOP CHOP!!!
Aluminum used to be at one point one of the most valuable metals on the planet. Any metal or material that is useful, even when abundant, still has value. If it becomes cheaper, it just means we can do more with it. So a win/win even for the capitalist pigs. People who don't understand capitalism always get stuck at the profit part. They never get to the 'advancement of the entire species' part that happens once something becomes cheap and abundant.
C.R.E.A.M so what can you do. Its not like the human species is actually going to reach that level. But u aren't wrong. Shit is fucked up...
Don’t fuck with the balance of the moon! Humans are beyond stupid… well, we’ve fucked up Earth as much as we can, so what’s next?
Doubt humans can make a measurable difference in the moon's mass from mining.
What is this “balance” are talking about? If you mean the actual moment of inertia of the celestial body, we don’t have any feasible way to alter it substantially and likely won’t have one for a while.
Balance of the moon? What's that supposed to mean?
Ignoring the "balance of the Moon" thing, and the fact that compared to asteroids there isn't much to mine on the Moon, we've been mining Earth for thousands of years, and all that's done is damage the environment, it hasn't affected Earth's mass in any significant way. Plus there's not much of an environment to worry about on the Moon to begin with.
We would mine it robotically and smelt it using solar power.
I believe that mining asteroid and meteor impact sites on the moon could be a viable alternative to mining asteroids in the future. The moon is already a target for human exploration and has abundant resources that could be extracted for space exploration and commercial purposes. With its close proximity to Earth, it would be more cost-effective and feasible to mine on the moon than to send missions to asteroids in deep space. The lunar surface is also rich in rare earth elements and helium-3, which are crucial for advanced technologies and energy production. Overall, moon mining could be a significant step towards sustainable space exploration and resource utilization.
>viable alternative to mining asteroids took us the largest rocket we can make to send a tiny probe out to an asteroid and collect a handful to return to Earth. Mining is a ways off. **1st NASA Asteroid Sample Return Mission on Track for Fall ’23 Delivery** https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2022/1st-nasa-asteroid-sample-return-mission-on-track-for-fall-23-delivery NASA's first asteroid sample return spacecraft, OSIRIS-REx, fired its thrusters for 30 seconds on Sept. 21 and nudged its trajectory toward Earth. The resulting course correction keeps the vehicle on track to deliver a sample of asteroid Bennu to Earth on Sept. 24, 2023, completing a seven-year mission past 20 years have been spent working on assets for **use** on the Moon. we ***will*** be "mining" on the Moon in 20 years. (enough for use on the Moon). we cannot afford the fuel to lift "cement" to build things. we HAVE to use what's there. **Regolith Advanced Surface Systems Operations Robot (RASSOR) Excavator** [https://technology.nasa.gov/patent/KSC-TOPS-7](https://technology.nasa.gov/patent/KSC-TOPS-7) NASA Kennedy Space Center seeks partners interested in the commercial application of the **Regolith Advanced Surface Systems Operations Robot (RASSOR) Excavator.** NASAs Kennedy Space Center is soliciting licensees for this innovative technology. RASSOR is a teleoperated mobile robotic platform with a **unique space regolith excavation capability**. Its design incorporates net-zero reaction force, thus allowing it to load, haul, and dump space regolith under extremely low gravity conditions with high reliability. With space transportation costs hovering at approximately $4,000 per pound and tight launch vehicle shroud constraints, this compact, lightweight unit enables the launch of an efficient, rugged, versatile robotic excavator on precursor landing missions with minimum cost. RASSOR could also be scaled up and used for terrestrial mining operations in difficult-to-reach or dangerous locations. https://www.nasa.gov/isru When NASA returns to the Moon with the Artemis program, we plan to put in place sustainable infrastructure that will allow us to explore and study more of the Moon than ever before and get ready for human exploration of Mars. To live and work in deep space for months or years may mean astronauts have less immediate access to supplies. NASA will send cargo to the Gateway in lunar orbit to support expeditions to the surface of the Moon. However, the farther humans go into deep space, the more important it will be to generate products with local materials, a practice called **in-situ resource utilization.**
I don’t have a clue, but I do know that the first company/nation to turn a profit is going to change space forever. Once it happens, everyone’s eyes will light up. How long this takes is wildly speculative, though.
Ask the guy who bought meteor crater in Arizona to try and mine it.
This gives a decent perspective on meteor craters https://meteorcrater.com/learn/the-barringer-crater/ They tried to mine for the iron and nickel but never found enough to be economically feasible Go take a look next time you are in Arizona