Inspired by a discussion here, I got to thinking: what resource (I assume a mineral) could realistically be discovered on the moon that would make extraction and delivery to Earth financially viable? In what quantities?
And what would need to be found on Mars to make the trip back to Earth lucrative enough to justify it?
Nothing.
Beyond the cost of restarting the entire “trip to the moon” program, you also have to transport materials for equiptment to mine and refine the element(s), build and fuel the return spacecraft, build habitats for the workers and provide food, air and water. This just scratches the surface.
Nothing at all? There is no mineral valuable enough on Earth now that finding a significant amount of it on the moon could justify the cost?
Obviously I don’t know what that mineral would be (since I asked the question), but it seems hard to believe that no such calculation could be made.
The Moon is only worth mining for resources that will be used in space, not for stuff that we would want to bring back to Earth. Everything that can be found on the Moon can be extracted more cheaply on Earth.
However there are lots of things that it could be cheaper to mine on the Moon, then used in space, because the cost of lifting them off the Moon is much cheaper than lifting them off Earth. Oxygen, titanium, silicon, iron, aluminium, some rare earths and phosphorous from KREEP. All these could be cheaper for use in space (if extracted from the Moon instead of lifting them off Earth), but only if we first spend trillions on developing a Moon mining industry first. This would take centuries to pay for itself, so long term thinking is required.
Almost nothing is cheaper if we mine it on Mars, but I think we’ll probably end up doing it anyway, in the long term, assuming we eventually develop a space economy.
There used to be some talk about mining Helium-3, an isotope abundant on the moon but scarce on Earth, for powering fusion reactors without the side effects of radioactivity or dangerous waste products. But apparently a Harvard study showed it would not be financially feasible, and it’s questionable whether a helium fusion reactor with a net power output could even be built.
Something to consider. You keep saying “valuable” but what you really mean is “high-priced.” Those are not synonymous terms. Price is determined by supply and demand.
Imagine the Moon was made of pure gold and everyone on Earth knew that. All the gold ever mined on Earth amounts to a cube a mere 70 feet on a side. If some entrepreneur brought a similar cube of gold down from the Moon, what happens to the price of gold? Answer: It collapses as total available supply is now vastly larger than current marginal demand. Now imagine being able to bring down gold in industrial quantities the way we ship oil or iron or cars around the oceans. We’d never make a sizeable dent in the Moon’s supply of gold, but soon there’d be so much gold on Earth that it would be as disposably cheap as styrofoam.
It’s quite unlikely they could meter the supply of new gold in such a way as to maintain the high price necessary to cover the expense of extracting, refining, and transporting that same gold back to Earth.
Whatever problems this demonstrates with the economics of gold, the economics are far worse for more prosaic minerals like e.g. iron or aluminum.
Delivering resources to low Earth orbit is much more valuable than to the surface. NASA will gladly pay thousands of dollars a gallon for water, and similar amounts for other consumables. But, NASA has a limit to how much water they need, and there are few other buyers.
Until there becomes a commercially viable reason to keep people in space, such exploitations will not be economically viable. OTOH, once someone does come up with a commercially viable reason to keep people in space, all those pesky engineering issues will evaporate quickly.
The mistake - and it’s a common one to make - is that you’re drastically underestimating how stupidly, absurdly expensive it is to get stuff into orbit. That’s why a space elevator is such a vivid pipe dream - if we could cheaply get stuff into orbit, the economics of space travel and exploitation would change completely.
Until we develop self-replicating mining nanobots (another scifi pipe dream, probably) that can bootstrap entire factories from just a few pounds of starter material, we’re not going to be doing much out there.
Ok, I hear you. But gold - like many other rare gems - is valued primarily because of its scarcity (and beauty, but that a result of that same scarcity).
However, there are elements/minerals that have practical value, now - for electronics, let’s say. They are extremely rare on Earth, but were they to be discovered on Earth, they wouldn’t go down in value, but rather be perhaps even more valuable because of the service they could provide (or replace other less efficient materials). I know that over time supply and demand might bring down the price, but I assume that initially those resources would still be in high demand.
So that’s what I’m asking about the moon. Again, I don’t know the answers here, so this is why I’m asking. But a quick search online says that a trip to the moon could cost around 4 billion dollars. One of the most expensive minerals, rhodium (which has practical purposes), has a price of around $15000 per ounce. So back of the envelope - that means about 8 tons would cover the cost of one trip. If extraction was easy (let’s say), couldn’t that possibly justify it?
We don’t need that far down the technological rabbit hole. Clanking replicators, that is systems that can build copies of themselves, but everything is well into the macroscopic scale, should suffice just fine.
A device that weighs a few tons is not that expensive to send to an asteroid, and is going to be far more capable than something that starts with a few pounds.
Both to save engineering, and assuage the fears of those who worry about replicators mutating and running amok, it’s easy enough to send it out with all the microchips it and its “descendents” will ever need.
That’s really neat!. Do we have that technology now, or is just a more plausible near-future scenario?
The point to lunar mining is not to bring stuff back to Earth, but to enable the construction of infrastructure on the Moon and in space.
One example: Solar Power Satellites. They are not really feasible if we need to build them on Earth and launch them into space. They are just way too massive.
But we are experimenting with space-based 3D printers that might one day be able to take titanium or alimunum powder sent from the moon and extrude it into the trusses, cables, and other heavy structural parts required for a large solar power satellite. Solar panels could be made in large quantities on the Moon. Vapor deposition in the Moon’s natural vacuum could allow huge quantities of scale. Those could,then be shipped from the Moon to Low Earth Orbit for about a quarter of the energy needed to get it from Earth.
Any large structures in Earth orbit could be made much cheaper from lunar-sourced materials. And of course, the existence of abundant local resources will make it much easier to build things like radio telescope dishes on the far side, or large settlements that could never have their resources all shipped from Earth.
If one day we crack fusion and get it to work with Helium-3, then thay would be the only lunar resource I can think of that would be valuable enough to ship back to Earth.
One caveat is thst we are talking about costs based on what we can do today. On Earth we have learned to ship stuff around the globe for prices that would have seemed outrageously low to someone just 100 years ago. A future moon with an electrmagnetic launcher powered by a nuclear plant could send payloads to Earth for very low marginal costs. Fuel for kick stages can be sourced from lunar aluminum.
If the payload is delivered to LEO and then taken down to the surface by reusable rockets, the shipping price could be very low. Low enough to start making it worth it to ship rare minerals or precious metals from the Moon.
That’s a really big “let’s say.” One of the reasons rhodium is expensive is because getting and refining it is complex. Since rhodium is refined from other metals, we’d either have to transport much more than those 8 tons back to earth and refine them planetside, or we’d have mine and refine it on the moon before getting it back.
If we’re positing tons and tons of pure rhodium just sitting on the surface waiting to be scooped up, you still have the problem of getting enough fuel to the moon to launch (even at moon gravity) all those tons of rhodium back to earth.
So you also need to build a factory for producing fuel on the moon, and then you have to add that into the cost. And so on and so on.
Sure, we do, it’s called a factory. It’s just not fully optimized for space yet.
Two things need to be improved is automation and working in the environment. The first is coming along, and fewer and fewer people are involved in turning raw materials into finished products.
The second could be more problematic, but it’s more that we just haven’t really done it at all. There are ideas on how to refine materials and manufacture them in space, but very little actual experimentation has been done, for obvious reasons.
The value of having materials in orbit is how they serve people. As long as governments are paying buckets of money to keep people in space for the purpose of keeping people in space, this will be an extremely limited market, probably not one that would justify much development of space resources. However, once there is a way to make money off of having people in space, and in a scalable way, all of those engineering problems will get solved quickly.
One point that the OP should consider is that this question gets asked over and over and over, and has been for many decades. It’s been thoroughly studied and the issue gets looked at anew with each era of technology and need.
That’s how people can answer with an instant “nothing.” Lots of people have made claims about moon mining and nothing ever comes from them, not even a start on Earth. Anything that would be that valuable on Earth is already being mined on Earth and the costs are, pardon me, astronomical. The costs of doing that same mining on the Moon would be hundreds or thousands of times higher, because setting up mining camps would take decades and be fantastically expensive to maintain. We also have no idea about the problems involved in zero-atmosphere and low-g mining.
If several nascent technologies were to be developed simultaneously to heights we can only imagine today, then maybe some of the costs would come down in time. None of that is predictable now. Moon mining may be a source sometime in an undefined future. Right now, it is a source for nothing but science.
The real money would be made by delivering materials to orbit, but, as long as that infrastructure is already in place, money can also be made by delivering some of those materials to consumers on the surface.
Yes, but that’s true everywhere. It takes time to build infrastructure and it will be done incrementally.
When we first started shipping stuff across oceans it was incredibly expensive. The first oil wells were very expensive. But today we can pump oil out of the ground on the other side of the world, get it to a port, ship it across the world, refine it, then ship,it across a continent then sell it at a profit for a couple of bucks per gallon - cheaper than bottled water. Humans are ingenious when it comes to shaving costs.
One advantage the moon holds over Earth is that the environment there is incredibly static. A machine built for harvesting regolith doesn’t have to worry about wind, rain, mud, randomly variable temperature, and all the rest of the complexity of mining on Earth. The moon being in near vacuum enables a lot pf processes that are expensive on Earth, and enables large scale automated processes.
Imagine setting some autonomous robot miners free on a huge tract of regolith. These things scoop,up regolith and bring it to large solar furnaces which melt the regolith, releasing oxygen, iron, titanium, and all sorts of useful stuff. Absent weather, the solid materials can just be put in huge piles with no protection from the elements required. We could even fill craters with the stuff, using them as pre-made silos.
Now we build a large reactor, either uranium or thorium, and we use that power to drive coils to electrmagnetically launch payloads. We also use the plant to power industrial processes on the Moon and provide life support to workers. We can sinter regolith with solar ovens to make building materials for the moon.
The launcher could launch stuff like ores that can handle high g’s without any rocket stage at all, or for more sensitive stuff it could act as a first stage at much lower g forces. Once in space, the payload can use lunar-sourced aluminum fuel to take it to LEO.
How cheap could this process get? Who knows? Maybe we’ll be able to ship stuff from the moon to LEO for a buck a kilo some day.
The mining wealth in space is not on the planets, but in the asteroids. Why? A, they are rich in metals, and B, unlike whatever might be found planetside, asteroids are just sitting in space waiting to be pushed to a manufacturing site, without the hurdle of being pulled out of a gravity well.
As noted above, all of this presupposes space-based industrial capacity to make the margins really worthwhile.
On this subject, I think we are going to find we agree much more than we disagree.
Yes, and this has gotten to the point where a fish can be caught off the coast, processed halfway around the world, and then returned to be served on a table only miles from where it was caught.
I’d say that a lack of environmental regulations also confer a bit of an advantage. Not saying we should cover the moon with toxic waste, but we aren’t really threatening an endangered animal when we set up a plant somewhere or other.
The environment is a challenge, now, as it’s an environment we haven’t really worked in much. However, I agree that once we have it figured out, the low pressure and gravity will actually prove to be beneficial in most processes.
I do like me some Thorium reactors. But solar shouldn’t be discounted. Sure, the Sun is down 2 weeks a month, but the 2 weeks it is up it is unobscured by clouds or weather. This predictability would allow scheduled use of high energy industries while the sun is up, and let them be furrowed when it is down.
Wind power, obviously, is a non-starter.
And you say that as a bit of a throw away, but it should be pointed out that aluminum and oxygen are very common on the moon, and they make an excellent form of rocket fuel. The process is simple, if energy intensive, which would be an excellent use of the predictable but intermittent solar energy.
While I agree, and find Mars to be a useless gravity hole, the Moon has the one benefit of being pretty close. It’ll probably be easier to develop space industries on the moon and then transfer those technologies to asteroids than just starting on the asteroids.
Another example that amazes me a bit; ocean shipping is cheap enough that for a dollar or so, I can buy a bottle of water from a well in Fiji or France or wherever.
All of this; gasoline and bottled water and fish and goods manufactured across the world is cheap enough because we’ve built a huge amount of infrastructure around making and processing and shipping it.