Moon / Asteroid Mining

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  • NASA is going back to the moon, and this time it means business.
  • Private companies are helping it build lunar transport, GPS, Wi-Fi, and more.
  • This new market, which is worth over $100 billion, could be game-changing for humanity.
 
Browser clicks are what you take
with Wi-Fi on the moon
I hope my fingers don't break
with Wi-Fi on the moon
We could browse forever
with Wi-Fi on the moon
We could be together
Videoconferencing with Wi-Fi on the moon
...
 
Let's see. We can't drive our cars because of Glow Bull Warming...but we're gonna expend Fossil Fuels, and generate all that CARBON, hauling minerals off the MOON?

How do people become Woke? Really strong dope?
 
This article is from March 2019.

Mining the moon ready to lift off by 2025​


European scientists have announced plans to start mining the moon as early as 2025, though what they’ll be extracting is neither gold nor diamonds, but waste-free nuclear energy thought to be worth trillions of dollars.
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The goal is to place a lander on the lunar surface to mine and process regolith for water, oxygen, metals and an isotope called helium-3, which may prove useful for fueling future fusion reactors.


Regolith, Universe Today reported, is a dust-like material that covers the lunar surface and is the result of billions of years of meteor and comet impacts. If anyone ever lives on the moon, they could use the regolith to build habitats for a base.

Read the rest:

 
Fast forward to June 2023. May have to register to read, it's free.

BRISBANE, June 28 (Reuters) - NASA is looking to develop resources on the moon that initially include oxygen and water, and eventually may expand to iron and rare earths, and has already taken steps toward excavating moon soil in 2032, a scientist said on Wednesday.

The U.S. space agency plans to return Americans to the moon as part of its Artemis mission, including the first woman and person of colour by 2025, and to learn from the mission to facilitate a trip to Mars.

 
August 2023.

MOSCOW, Aug 21 (Reuters) - The race to explore and develop the moon's resources has begun and Russia must remain a player despite the failure of its first lunar mission in 47 years, the head of Russia's space agency Roskosmos said on Monday.

Russia's Luna-25 space craft spun out of control and crashed into the moon on Saturday after a problem preparing for pre-landing orbit, underscoring the post-Soviet decline of a once mighty space programme.

 
...
A rover, named Pragyan, or wisdom, is set to analyze the chemical makeup of the moon’s surface and search for water over the course of one lunar day, which is equivalent to 14 days on Earth.

The timing of the successful landing - in the middle of the BRICS Summit, and just days after Russia's epic fail - is not lost of most as Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said: "This is an unprecedented moment."
...


I wasn't aware that they had even launched a rocket at the moon.
 
Just think of the miles points you will get with one trip?
 
fwiw...........dyodd

India, China & Russia Confirmed Real Reason They Are Racing To Moons South Pole​

Sep 23, 2023


9:54

Chandrayaan-3 and its Vikram Lander have dominated headlines this month after a successful moon mission and its continued exploration. But Russia, China, Japan, and the US are also racing to land on the surface of the moon. After over 50 years since NASA landed on the moon, why all of a sudden do the world's emerging and established superpowers want to go back at the same time. Today we explain the reason why.
 
From the link:

EVERYONE’S INTO ASTEROIDS these days. Space agencies in Japan and the United States recently sent spacecraft to investigate, nudge, or bring back samples from these hurtling space rocks, and after a rocky start, the space mining industry is once again on the ascent. Companies like AstroForge, Trans Astronautica Corporation, and Karman+ are preparing to test their tech in space before venturing toward asteroids themselves.

It’s getting serious enough that economists published a series of papers on October 16 considering the growth of economic activity in space. For instance, a study by Ian Lange of the Colorado School of Mines considers the potential—and challenges—for a fledgling industry that might reach a significant scale in the next several decades, driven by the demand for critical metals used in electronics, solar and wind power, and electric car components, particularly batteries. While other companies are exploring the controversial idea of scooping cobalt, nickel, and platinum from the seafloor, some asteroids could harbor the same minerals in abundance—and have no wildlife that could be harmed during their extraction.

 

Space Mining’s Best Prospect Is VC Money, Not Asteroid Gold​

Despite entrepreneurs’ hopes, the technical challenges and huge costs mean no one will be retrieving ore from the heavens anytime soon.

A small slice of Piguem Nonralta sits on Matt Gialich’s desk. The metallic ball, roughly the size of a doughnut hole, was discovered in Argentina in 1576 when Spanish colonizers went searching for iron ore and stumbled on the scattered remnants of a 4,000-year-old meteor shower. Piguem Nonralta, the name the Indigenous population gave to the asteroid craters, roughly translates to “field of heaven.” Gialich, the 37-year-old entrepreneur at the helm of a startup seeking to mine asteroids, keeps the ancient nugget at his office in Pasadena, California, as a reminder of his company’s celestial ambitions.

“These are very, very lucrative sources of ore,” Gialich says, holding the orbital tchotchke to eye level. The meteors contain iron and traces of elements such as iridium, one of the rarest minerals in the Earth’s crust. His company, AstroForge Inc., is among several startups that have studied the metallic composition of fallen asteroids and now want to mine them in outer space.

The idea isn’t new. Asteroid mining companies have tried for decades to harvest metals while attracting heaps of cash from big-name investors such as Titanic filmmaker James Cameron and Google’s Larry Page. So far, nobody has succeeded. Most space miners have either gone bust or sold out to bigger companies. Planetary Resources, a buzzy startup that attracted more than $50 million in financing to extract metals and water from nearby asteroids, crashed and burned after about a decade in operation, and was eventually acquired by a blockchain company in 2018.

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