Mining the Moon - Good or Bad?

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Yeah why not, about damned time we have a moon base.


I think the political stuff around it is more complicated than the science though. Who owns the moon? Who do you pay for a mining license? Who regulates it?
 
What we need to do is get up there first and establish a perimeter defense of AA guns. Then we can mine away on the policy of "COME AT ME BRO".
 
This topic has been covered in team building exercises at various places of work. Google will bring up lots of stuff. I recall doing this at UPS Cologne.
 
SMN said:
This. The cost of getting there, back, wages, insurance to name but a few - you'd need to be mining something you can get ONLY on the moon, essentially. And you'd need a damn good reason for needing it.
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Not true. We need space resources, they don't need to come back to earth, so cost of resources on earth is meaningless. It's the cost of launching resources to space that it will have to compete with, at least in the foreseeable future.


It's inevitable and it's a good thing. So many things in space that can solve issues here, if you can mine in space you can build massive solar farms as one example, where sun light is 5x stronger than at sea level due to no atmosphere and shines 24/7. In the long term you could send rare earth minerals to earth. But for the foreseeable future. Space mining will be to open up space, not to bring back to earth.
There's also hundreds of satellites that cost several hundred million each, yet have a life span of less than 2 decades, as they run out if fuel, it's not economical to refuel them from earth. However mine water in space, split it and have automated vehicles to re fill them, is a real possibility in coming decades.

Op what are you destroying on the moon? In the normal sense there isn't really anything to destroy, there's no eco systems, there's no such thing as pollution etc.
 
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Judgeneo said:
I think the political stuff around it is more complicated than the science though. Who owns the moon? Who do you pay for a mining license? Who regulates it?
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It is very interesting, no one and no one. However the launch country owns any items. So Apollo infrastructure is still owned by USA, although they dont own anything immediately around it, so dont win the ground it's stood on or the "air" space above it.

First ~20mins is about this subject, basically there are no laws, the treaties are worthless as there's no channels of enforcement or punishment. It is like the very first days of pioneers heading out west to new ground. Arm it's not an issue as it's so hard, it will have to get sorted at some point.

 
Surely if you mine enough of it and it looses enough mass it'll start negatively affecting our tides and weather systems on Earth?

And what do we do once we've ruined the moon? It's not cost effective to do either.
 
My poor understanding is that the moon comprises ejecta from a collision between earth and another body such that moon rock is primarily earth rock. ie huge amounts of the lighter metal ores and silicates.

Useful as a launch base for further space travel, not necessarily as a resource for minerals. Asteroids are a more likely resource, and could be mined from lunar bases.

Deep sea mining is more likely in the shorter time scale.
 
Freefaller said:
Surely if you mine enough of it and it looses enough mass it'll start negatively affecting our tides and weather systems on Earth?
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Good luck removing any significant amount. The moon is absolutely massive at roughly 7.3477×10^22 kilograms
In more normal terms.
73.5 million million million metric tonnes.
 
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