i wonder what they would find? would it be that different from earth to be worth it?
I’m a pessimist about Lunar mining, so I’m not the best person to answer this. I think water ice will be the most useful for crewed bases and converting to propellant. I’m not aware of anything on the moon that makes financial sense to mine then bring back to Earth. Theoretically, some expensive metals might make sense, but they haven’t been found yet.
Blue Origin’s “Blue Alchemist” program is an ISRU (in-situ resource utilization) demo that’s supposed to rove around, sift through massive amounts of regolith, and collect and heat it to thousands of degrees to split out the ingredients for solar panels. It’s cool that it’s possible, but the amount of ground they have to cover for tiny amounts of ingredients makes it not seem worthwhile at all to me.
I’m a pessimist about Lunar mining, so I’m not the best person to answer this. I think water ice will be the most useful for crewed bases and converting to propellant. I’m not aware of anything on the moon that makes financial sense to mine then bring back to Earth. Theoretically, some expensive metals might make sense, but they haven’t been found yet.
Blue Origin’s “Blue Alchemist” program is an ISRU (in-situ resource utilization) demo that’s supposed to rove around, sift through massive amounts of regolith, and collect and heat it to thousands of degrees to split out the ingredients for solar panels. It’s cool that it’s possible, but the amount of ground they have to cover for tiny amounts of ingredients makes it not seem worthwhile at all to me.