Is Moon Mining Economically Feasible?
THE USA VERSION
by Leonard David, Famous Space Insider Columnist
The moon may offer pay dirt with a rewarding mother lode of resources, a celestial gift that is literally up for grabs. But what's really there for the taking, and at what cost?
A new assessment of whether or not there's an economic case for mining the moon has been put forward by Ian Crawford, a professor of planetary science and astrobiology at Birkbeck College, London. His appraisal is to appear in a forthcoming issue of the journal Progress in Physical Geography.
Crawford said it's hard to identify any single lunar resource that will be sufficiently valuable to drive a lunar resource extraction industry on its own. Nonetheless, he said the moon does possess abundant raw materials that are of potential economic interest.
Lunar resources could be used to help build up an industrial infrastructure in near-Earth space, Crawford said, a view shared by space scientist Paul Spudis of the Lunar Planetary Institute and others.
"If the moon's resources are going to be helpful, they are going to be helpful beyond the surface of the moon itself," Crawford said. Still, the overall case for any future payoff from exploiting the moon's resources has yet to be made, Crawford said.
"It's quite complicated," he told Space.com. "It's not simple at all."
Vanishing resource
One bit of skepticism from Crawford concerns helium-3. Advocates envision mining the moon for this isotope of helium, which gets embedded in the upper layer of lunar regolith by the solar wind over billions of years. Hauling back the stuff from the moon could power still-to-be-built nuclear fusion reactors here on Earth, advocates say.
"It doesn't make sense, the whole helium-3 argument," Crawford said. Strip-mining the lunar surface over hundreds of square kilometers would produce lots of helium-3, he said, but the substance is a limited resource.
"It's a fossil fuel reserve. Like mining all the coal or mining all the oil, once you've mined it … it's gone," Crawford said. The investment required and infrastructure necessary to help solve the world's future energy needs via moon-extracted helium-3 is enormous and might better be used to develop genuinely renewable energy sources on Earth, he added.
"It strikes me that, as far as energy is concerned, there are better things one should be investing in. So I'm skeptical for that reason. But that doesn't mean that I don't think the moon, in the long-term, is economically useful," Crawford said.
But Crawford has a caveat about helium-3: Estimates for the abundance of the isotope are based on Apollo moon samples brought back from the low latitudes of the moon.
JAPAN'S VERSION
Japan Is Launching An Asteroid Mining Space Program
Japanese space scientists have unveiled the asteroid hunting space probe they hope to launch later this year on a mission to mine a celestial body.
The probe, named Hayabusa-2, is expected to be flung into space on a rocket for a mammoth four year voyage to the unpoetically-named 1999JU3 asteroid.
When it gets there, some time in 2018, it will release a powerful cannon which will fire a metal bullet at the asteroid's barren crust, once the probe itself has scuttled to safety on the far side of the rock.
It will then return to scoop up material uncovered by the cannon blast.
If all goes well, these pristine asteroid samples will be returned to Earth by the time Tokyo hosts the Olympic Games in 2020.
At a weekend press conference, Hitoshi Kuninaka, project leader at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) said he and his team were readying to redouble their efforts for this "new voyage".
"I'm grateful as the new asteroid probe is now nearly complete," he said, according to Jiji Press.
The probe is the successor to JAXA's first asteroid explorer, Hayabusa -- the Japanese term for falcon -- which returned to earth in 2010 with dust samples after a trouble-plagued seven-year mission.
source: www.space.com; www.businessinsider .com
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