Eh, if we really tried, we could probably put a recognizable soft drink logo on the surface of the Moon.
No, 7000 per month is correct. The post is in response to 500 ton capacity being available on current SpaceEx vehicles returning.
The problem is the overhead cost of mining in space. Millions of tons would be needed to cover the costs of operations to make the price of space minerals comparable to what’s available on earth.
Only a Moke is truly a Coke.
Let me rephrase - there is nothing we could do on the moon in the course of normal industrial activities that could be seen with the naked eye from Earth.
The unaided eye, in perfect conditions, can resolve objects about 200 km across at the Moon’s distance. We can see smaller craters like Aristarchus because they are extremely bright, so we see them as bright points.
That’s a pretty good example, actually. Aristarchus dwarfs the largest open pit mine on Earth. The Bingham Canyon copper mine is 1.5 kilometers deep and four kilometers wide. Aristarchus is 4 kilometers deep and 40 kilometers wide - ten times larger - and we can only see it as a bright point because the material it excavated is bright anorthosite.
So until we can build something on the moon ten times bigger than the biggest open mine on Earth, you won’t be able to see it. Even a large city on the moon wouldn’t be resolvable from Earth with the naked eye. Even high resolution images with my 8" scope can only resolve down to about half a kilometer in perfect conditions. The Hubble could resolve 80m objects, but we don’t use Hubble to look at the Moon.
You could detonate an H-bomb on the Moon, and we wouldn’t be able to see the crater.
Heinlein’s idea of using rockets to launch reflective material to intentionally create a logo visible from Earth is not really feasible. You would have to lay material down over tens of thousands of square kilometers. Given how rough the surface of the moon is, you’d have to lay down a pretty thick layer.
Just for fun, I did some math. Let’s say we used something very light and very bright, like talcum powder. Talcum powder weighs 2.76g per cubic centimeter. So let’s say we lay it down a centimeter thick. So a square meter would weigh 2.76 kg.
Let’s say we wanted to draw a logo on Mare Serenitatis (the left eye of the ‘Man on the Moon’). Let’s further suppose that the logo fills 10% of the area of the Mare. The Mare’s area is roughly 350,000 square kilometers, so we would need 35,000 square kilometers of talc, 1 cm thick.
It turns out that we would need 2.76 million kg of talc for each square kilometer of fill, so to put our logo in the Sea of Serenity would require 96.6 billion kg of talc. And that would be just on the threshold of visibility. The Sea of Serenity itself is only resolvable as a tiny dark circle. Most people would never even notice the logo, it would take perfect vision and a clear night to be able to see it at all.
If all goes according to plan, the SpaceX Starship will be able to land 100 tonnes of material on the moon. So our little logo would require 966,000 Starship flights.
As I said, we are in no danger of despoiling the way the moon looks from Earth.
This is only true if all the stuff that’s mined is being brought back to Earth. But what about the case where almost everything mined (water, carbon, iron, aluminum, etc.) is being used in space and a relatively small amount of stuff that can’t be used up there comes out as a byproduct or for very little additional cost. It might be worthwhile to bring some of that byproduct (e.g. platinum or perhaps some rare earth elements such as neodymium) back if it can be done cheaply enough.
However, not gold. For that, you just store it in an “orbital vault” and sell pieces of paper giving ownership to a certain amount of space-gold. It wouldn’t be all that different than how a lot of gold is owned right now.
A centimeter is much, much thicker than you’d need. You could probably make something visible with a layer a few microns thick.
I think we’ll have to disagree. The lunar regolith is pretty coarse in places. But even if it were only 1/100 of a cm thick you’d still need almost 10,000 starship flights just to deliver the material.
Of course, what you’d probably do is make the the stuff on the moon out of titanium oxide, which is bright white, and titanium and oxygen are both abundant on the Moon.
But still, the point remains that it would take a herculean effort to make something on the Moon that could be seen from Earth, and that’s if you specifically went out of your way to make such a thing.
Normal industrial activities at almost any scale we can currently imagine would not be visible from Earth. Roads would not be visible. Mines would not be visible. Giant solar installations would mot be visible. Huge telescopes would not be visible. The moon will look essentially unchanging from Earth regardless of whether we ‘exploit’ it or not.
Hell, even with billions people industrializing Earth for hundreds of years, human activity is not visible from the Moon with the unaided eye.
I opened this thread because I thought it was going to be about alien police that confiscated something. Sorry to barge in.
The cheapest way to bring something from Low Earth Orbit to Earth is to use a ballistic entry. Dissipating several kilometers per second velocity with atmospheric friction costs almost nothing.
In regards to the costs of materials, we are approaching a time when we will have to choose between destroying our habitat and enjoying the fruits of technology. Copper is essential to electronics, but is becoming more and more difficult to extract, due to environmental concerns. Butte, Montana in the U.S.A, is a good example of what mining can do to a area. The proposed Bristol Bay mine in Alaska could destroy a major salmon run.
Given those two options, I think I’d choose enjoying the fruits of technology. Rather cake-or-death, that one.
Even years ago, the largest copper ‘mine’ in America was … the Bell System. Every truck had a recycling box in the back, where the workers threw excess lengths of copper wire, and every central office had a similar recycling container. Overall, these recycling efforts produced more copper than any mine in the country.
So that is what can be done in recycling. Similarly, aluminum is one of the most valuable materials in the recycling stream. Many programs have problems with people stealing the aluminum cans. And this recycling saves energy twice, since refining raw aluminum is very electricity-intensive.
So it is possible to have both. it will take increased recycling efforts, and more attention to the entire lifecycle of products that are used, but it seems qithin reach.
Yes - the same point came up with electric cars. Sooner or later (later, I hope) the batteries in electric cars will no longer be serviceable. But - unlike the carbon in regular cars, the cobalt, nickel, lithium etc. are still all there and ready to be recovered.
In fact, recovering metal - usually copper - from old buildings, often unsanctioned, is another large source of recycling. (The plumber who helped put in my college’s student darkroom in the basement of a 1900’s house was a volunteer, but happy to accept as payment the 18 inches of thick 4-inch lead drainpipe he recovered doing the job.)
But tech changes things and resources are lessening in demand. I imagine the house of the future where, thanks to LED lights and low-power electronics, only the kitchen and bathroom plugs and the major appliances need 15-amp circuits and everything else is wired with much lower power (a house full of USB-C plugs?) using one quarter the copper, for example.
(I think Heinlein had in mind the 7Up logo when he wrote that, he was pointing out to -I imagine - Coca Cola the difference in logo size and readability across the moon. The idea was to use something highly reflective rather than a full coat of paint. the moon is actually dark gray, and with the full moon we are almost in line with the sun, a bright reflective layer much like safety equipment material does not have to be anywhere near a complete coating to stand out.)
To get the material from the asteroid is the usage of the rocket made special for LEO depending on the place where the asteroid located, for example, Skyrora XL rocket can take back something to the Earth from Sun-Synchronous Orbit. But as for me, the harder task is to find out how to get the materials from asteroids.