Resources on the moon and Mars

Factual Questions
21

Agreed,woth all of that. And not only is solar predictable, it sticks around for weeks at a time, enabling processes using solar furnaces for smelting and such.

There is a new discovery regarding lava tubes - it turns out that the ‘skylights’ (holes open to the lava tube) collect a lot of solar heat, and may be the hottest places on the moon. This heat gets reflected into the tube, making parts of it a constant 17 degrees or so - perfect living temperatures. A lava tube could host huge colonies of people, or be a good protected space for industry.

The problem with Mars as a place for human colonization is that we don’t currently know of anything there that is of enough economic value to justify a colony. And without economic justification we would never be able to afford building a colony to the point where it could be self-sustaining.

The Moon may not turn out to be economically viable either, but at least we can see the potential for it.

22

Yes, the price reduction in global shipping is truly astounding.

Behind the numbers, though, is the reality that the cheapness is possible today only because for decades the world’s capitalists have poured literally trillions of dollars into infrastructure to create a market for billions now finally worth trillions itself. We’re still at the comparative level of a Polynesian sending a craft to a distant island for exploration, with no thought of trade. That’s how far we need to advance.

Any investment in space mining, whether the Moon or asteroids, will cost trillions and lots of them. Therefore any return sought will have to be worth trillions and be attainable in a reasonable amount of time. Imaginary engineering is fun for many people, but not so much for bankers and venture capitalists.

There’s also the small issue that global warming will need tens of trillions of dollars on its own just to mitigate conditions so that the people who would benefit from space mining have a consumer audience to serve. Many voices are already being raised to insist that every available dollar go to mitigation. Imaginary benefits from imaginary engineering in a distant imaginary future aren’t sufficient as a counterargument. Until the space enthusiasts can respond with a concrete “something” I see space mining as I do nuclear fusion - always twenty-five years away, as it’s been since the 1950s.

23

Maybe. It’s not about gravity wells though, but about how much delta-V is required to get there and back. The Moon’s gravity well requires about 2.5 km/sec of delta V to escape, so any asteroid that requires more than that to get to actually has more expensive shipping costs.

The paper below looks at the Delta-V requirements for the closest near-Earth asteroids. They range from 6.5 to 10 km/s, making it cheaper to get to/from the surface of the Moon to LEO than to and from any of the asteroids.

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/S-Ieva/publication/263280808_Low_Delta-V_Near-Earth_Asteroids_a_survey_of_suitable_targets_for_space_missions/links/546b498f0cf2f5eb180917a0/Low-Delta-V-Near-Earth-Asteroids-a-survey-of-suitable-targets-for-space-missions.pdf?origin=publication_detail

As for ease of mining, that’s not clear. Mining in zero-g has its own challenges. For one thing, you have to take your power source with you, and if you are out in the asteroid belt you’re not getting anywhere near the solar power you get in Earth orbit. Depending on the asteroid you may need to carry your own return fuel as well, whereas you can lunar-source fuel if you are mining there. Gravity assisted distillation and separation would instead require centrifuges.

One thing people forget about the Moon’s composition is that we are always talking abiut the ‘bulk’ moon - not what we might find concentrated in veins and deposits. The moon has been a dumping ground for space dust and meteors for billions of years, and without weathering, running water, plate tectonics and the rest of stuff that distributes and buries material on Earth, we could find all sorts of concentrated materials. For example, it’s thought that the central peaks of large craters may contain large portions of the impactor that created the crater. That could be metals, carbon compounds, all sorts of stuff.

We have only a few samples of the moon’s surface, harvested from locations that were primarily chosen for ease of landing and scientific potential, not likelihood of finding valuable material. Also, the moon is covered by a few meters of billions of years worth of pulverized surface, and the interesting stuff is likely below that. We won’t know until we go and look.

24

Any chance the moon is made out of printer ink?

25

We aren’t going to plan and build a manufacturing infrastructure as some kind of giant public works project. If it happens at all, it will happen incrementally and each increment will have its own justifications, just as we did it on Earth.

‘Billionaires’ didn’t build our infrastructure. Neither did governments. They both contributed some pieces along the way, but mostly our infrastructure evolved from the results of billions of people solving everyday problems. A guy here working on a way to make a hull more streamlined. A guy who figured out the value of standardized shipping containers. Companies that built automation for ports. Crane companies that realized a market for huge cranes to offload ships. Oil companies investing in pipelines.

In short, it was the forces of the market that drove a million bottom-up processes that resulted in an emerging high efficiency transportation system for goods and services.

The same process will have to happen on the moon. We need many reasons for being there. We need to let the process of discovery and the needs of the market drive changes that slowly improve efficiency and open up new opportunities that drive further efficiency gains.

If we decide what the Moon needs is a giant centrally planned trillion dollar ‘investment’ designed by the big brains, it will fail. It’s too complex, with too many unknowns. Governments and billionaires might be needed in the early phases to kick-start the technologies and set the conditions for a merket to have a chance to thrive, but after that the future of lunar mining will be determined by markets and people on the ground. Maybe it will never be much of anything, but maybe it will. You can’t predict the future - or plan it. All we can say is that the Moon has certain potentials that may be exploitable.

26

It would be long since clogged up.

27

It’s sometimes said that 49 cents a pound bananas are proof of the marvel of modern logistics.

28

And, as you said, trillions have been poured into the infrastructure that we have now. Once an economic value is found, those trillions will pour into space ventures.

Aside from the issue that using the idea that “there are other problems to work on, so why work on this one?” would mean that we still live in caves and huts, industries in space may very well help to mitigate global warming. Between moving heavy polluting industries and energy generation off planet, and possibly even installing solar shades, space development doesn’t have to come at the cost of global warming, in fact, it may very well be the only thing that can solve that problem.

So, how would that work? Forbid Musk and Bezos from spending money on building their space program and demand that they use that money for climate mitigation?

So, until we have space mining, you won’t accept that it’s possible? That’s the sort of attitude that leaves us living in caves.

29

The conundrum is that before anything was ever launched into space we by definition did without space and so didn’t need it. Once launchers and satellites came around, a handful of premium services like military reconnaissance and niche markets like communications and weather imaging were worth it but not much else. The chicken and the egg problem is that if space costs a fortune to reach few people will go there, and if no one goes there then there isn’t enough of a market to justify investing in reducing launch costs. This, along with the domination of the launcher market by military-aerospace contractors, stymied space development for literally decades. We’ve known since the 1960s that if you had a fully reusable system that worked, and operated on a large enough economy of scale, that spaceflight would be much cheaper; but how to get there? The Shuttle was an attempt to break this circular logic by trying to make space launch at least somewhat cheaper, but failed. For decades space enthusiasts have hoped that some sort of “killer app” would appear that would make space valuable enough to jumpstart an investment cycle.

Enter SpaceX. Elon Musk found what may finally be the market for cheap and frequent spaceflight: global wireless internet service (although there were failed predecessors like Iridium). Something that just wasn’t a prospect in the twentieth century, although some had foreseen similar telephone service. On the scale that Starlink would require, Musk calculated that it would literally be cheaper to develop his own rockets in house than to try to contract for what launch services were asking. So, willing to invest billions of his own money in what looked like a vanity project at first, Musk created the first rockets designed foremost for economy. In doing so he has not only dramatically dropped the cost of orbital launch but actually advanced the technology by finally making rockets at least limitedly reusable.

But SpaceX is looking further. Musk wants to colonize Mars, and so he is essentially his own market for the next generation rocket- Starship- that if it works will drop the cost of spaceflight to close to the theoretical minimum possible with today’s technology. It helps that Starlink and the Falcon 9 have served as testbeds for the fundamental engineering needed to make Starship work.

30

As rich as Elon Musk is, I’m skeptical that he has enough money and resources to colonize Mars.

31

Maybe he’d go scout it out in advance just to be sure.

32

Back in the early 1950s, a small group of scientists, science writers, and science fiction writers started proselytizing for space. Collier’s magazine ran a series of articles by them, with fantastic illustrations by Chesley Bonestell, from 1952 to 1954, eventually collected in several books. Huge successes, they popularized the notion of space travel and a space station.

Interestingly, at almost exactly the same time, the first modern container ships were launched.

In the intervening 70 years, deep space travel - beyond low-level satellites - has not advanced in any way expected in 1952, while containerization has transformed the world. It therefore should be instructive to look at the differences.

Containerization had a base of hundreds of years of knowledge and expertise and worldwide contacts already in place. Even so, even with everybody’s agreement that containers could be a superior method of transport, the actual rollout took decades to become the dominant means of transoceanic shipping. The costs of creating the infrastructure in every port in the world was simply daunting. Worse, many existing ports couldn’t easily re-create themselves as container ports, especially as the size of container ships kept getting ever larger. It took time and money and huge political battles to get to where we are today. Even the Panama Canal had to be rebuilt to accommodate them. All of that was done only after the financial rewards were obvious to everyone.

Space had no base at all to build on. Until recently, only governments had the money to start a space program. While science-fiction writers talked of building spaceships in their backyards, the real-life Apollo programs was the culmination of tens of billions in spending, and can be thought of as a trillion-dollar program in today’s money. It got a piece of debris to the moon and was good for absolutely nothing else. The few space stations put into orbit don’t resemble the habitats envisioned by the early pioneers, but are science labs as austere as an Antarctic base.

Today private space programs are undertaken outside of government, but only by true billionaires. For all their money on paper, they are using only small portions of their billions and gearing them to small programs that have the hope of making money filling niches that the governments have decided they don’t want to divert their money to. Elon Musk does talk of a Mars base, but that’s always been talk and bravado, like his Hyperloop.

The issue is and has always been money. The argument that we are luddites unless we put money into space is easily swatted away and has been by the money people since day one. They would be happy to receive the bountiful returns on investment that have been repeatedly promised. They came around on containerization because they saw what the end product would look like. Space has literally no end product that anybody has completely articulated over 70 years.

Governments always make choices about where their money gets spent. Private investors always make choices about their money gets spent. Both have sunk trillions into wild schemes since the 1950s, some of which have paid off just enough to keep them in business despite the far larger number of failures.

Yet the money people have always avoided deep space. They look at the proposals and see that something unspecified MAY happen IF we can develop Z AND IF we can develop Y AND IF we also can develop Z AND IF somebody gets lucky about AA. No thanks is the proper answer. They can always find other places that have better chances of return.

Nor is the “we can do both” argument convincing. It has been true that NASA’s budget since the end of the Cold War is such a trivial portion of the federal budget that its funding is not much of a political issue. But that budget has already been capped and the spending moved to the private sector, which is also capped by how much of the billionaires’ money they are allowed to spend without check by their boards.

Spending trillions on space with no understanding of any return is not politically possible. People will push back on that and politicians will be happy to accommodate them. Finding that amount of money in the private sector will also be increasingly unfeasible. Funding is not bottomless. The money people are always searching between choices and are answerable to their boards and stockholders. Given gigantic cries for spending money on climate mitigation versus small numbers of people asking for similar sums for space, the space-happy will lose.

Unless. Of course the future cannot be predicted. That is my mantra and one I’ve been screaming for many years. Some breakthrough may lead to tangible results deserving funding. Some choice now being made may pay off and bring more investment. Some earth technologies may unexpectedly be applicable in space.

Reality, however, tells us that not even the most favorable of these developments will have any appreciable effect for several decades. In that time everything else will also change. Maybe in twenty-five years the conversation will be different and it will be obvious that space can be worth the investment.

Maybe. But today the answer is still “nothing” and all the talk is still, after 70 years, talk.

33

Interesting comparison. People were already sending ships full of stuff from one part of the world to another, but loading and unloading them took days. So containerized shipping had advantages (and the same containers could then be placed on trains or trucks for further transport).

I’m not sure what the big advantage is of deep space travel.

34

Right, as you are saying, once profit is available to be made, money will move in, lots of money, enough money to transform the entire industry.

But that’s not an argument that anyone is making, so I don’t understand your need to swat it away.

And the technology is changing, the costs are changing, and the needs are changing. You are not guaranteed that this situation you describe is set in stone, unchanging forever.

The “We can only do one thing, and nothing else” argument is far less so.

The money spent on space so far has paid dividends that make it worthwhile. Plus, we aren’t just launching money into space, that money goes to people, people with jobs, families and mortgages.

No, it cannot be, which is why I find it so frustrating that this post is predicting the future with such certainty. Someone says, “This is a possibility.” And the reaction is often, "No, it cannot happen because it hasn’t happened, and what has happened is all that can happen. "

As long as no one thinks it is worth investing in space, it will never change. Fortunately, there are those who think it is worth investing in, whether they be governments or billionaires, and those are the ones who are changing that paradigm.

35

I may be misreading your argument and you are absolutely misreading my argument, so I’m not sure we can get any farther.

I will make one correction. I have been living through the space future every moment since I was a small child. I watched it, studied it, anticipated it, and read as much as I could about it, and then went back to the past to see how it evolved from the earliest days.

If I am disillusioned it’s from past disappointment and the knowledge that all the talk about human space travel and space colonies and space mining has been, again and again and again, utter bullshit. As I quite explicitly said, maybe this will change in the future. I won’t live to see it, though, and I doubt if anyone posting in this thread will.

We’re not getting flying cars, either, no matter how many times they’ve been invented. Past performance sometimes truly is a predictor of future results.

36

It would have to worry a lot about dust, though.

Also, temperature variations may not be random, but they are regular and massive, with a swing of over 600 F degrees every month.

37

The only materials that might be economical to mine in outer space are rare metals like Platinum or Palladium, for catalysts. These metals are exceedingly rare on Earth, and their use is restricted by their scarcity. If an asteroid in a accessible orbit was found to have significant amounts of these metals, a robotic mining mission might (just might) be economical.

38

A big problem with the romantisation of colonizing space: who wants to live their lives—and have their children live their lives—inside of an airtight metal frame inside of a lava tube inside of a hard vacuum?

39

I share your disappoinbtment and to some degree your cynical outlook. I grew up reading Heinlein and Clarke. I remember the promise of O’Neill cylinders, and NASA’s plan to put men on Mars in the 1990s. None of it happened. We haven’t even left Low Earth Orbit since Apollo 17.

However, times have changed. The problem before was that NASA was the only game in town, and NASA had limited budgets and political realities to face. The conventional wisdom (even on this board) was that NASA had shown that private companies couldn’t do space as it cost many billions of dollars and was too complex and took too long for ‘short-thinking’ companies to invest.

SpaceX changed all that. Once private industry got involved in a big way, the cost to launch a kilo into LEO dropped from $35,000 to $1200. If Starship pans out, it will drop again by an order of magnitude. That opens up commercial possibilities that never existed before.

Furthermore, SpaceX kicked off a commercial race for space launch, and there are now multiple companies planning or building reusable rockets.

The space industry is also becoming very large. The global space economy is now worth half a trillion dollars. That is a LOT of investment. NASA has wisely chosen to outsource a lot of its future hardware to private firms. Under CLPS there are now private companies building moon landers and rovers. Space capacity is growing all over the world. There’s also a new cold war brewing with China, which has great ambitions for space and are actually advancing faster than NASA currently is.

Starship is a game changer. A lot of people with money are sitting on the sidelines right now, waiting to see if Starship works as advertised. If it does, I expect to see a whole new raft of startups to exploit the adjacent possible that will open when you can put mass in orbit for $120/kilo.

For hundreds of years, ocean crossings were the domain of governments or people with very wealthy sponsors. It was dangerous and uncommon, with high risk. But once a tipping point was reached where technology made shippig safer and markets could form, ocean voyages and shipping grew rapidly.

That’s where we are today - on the verge of a tipping point away from space being the domain of governments and government contractors, and becoming a place where even modest companies can take part. Sending a speculative mining robot into space at $30,000 per kilo was not sensible. Doing it for $120 per kilo might be.

Remember space hotels and private space stations? They were a thing we were going to have ‘soon’ since the 1960s, and never arrived. But now Axiom Space is actually building one. Bigelow has an inflatable hab attached to the space station. SpaceX is still planning to send a mission with private passengers around the Moon.

This isn’t the same situation you and I grew up in. Things have changed. There’s still a lot of uncertainty, but the prospects for real space advancement have never looked better than they do now.

40

I understand how excited the space-happy crew has been over the past few years. Good for you guys. (Seventy years and still all I ever see in these discussions are guys. That’s a problem, even if it isn’t literally true overall.)

I’ve been drawing a line between the low-earth-orbit activity that is seeing a boom and deep space operations. Those are far off. Far, far off. Nothing I’m seeing low-earth makes me change that opinion.