Five years ago, if you had brought up moon mining among geologists, “you would have been laughed out of the room,” said Gordon Osinski, founder and director of the Canadian Lunar Research Network, and an assistant professor of geology at the University of Western Ontario.
Times have changed. Mining on the moon and on asteroids, formerly the stuff of science fiction, is clearly in the sights of governments and, increasingly, private companies.
In February, NASA announced it was accepting applications from U.S. companies to build robots for lunar prospecting, a step toward creating an economy in space.
And there’s certainly a market for what’s up there. Many elements that are rare on Earth can be found aplenty on the moon. Satellite imaging has shown that the top 10 centimetres of regolith (moon soil) at the south pole of the moon appears to hold about 100 times the concentration of gold of the richest mines in the world, according to a recent paper coauthored by Dale Boucher, the CEO of Deltion Innovations, based in Sudbury, Ont.
“There is a business case now for mining (on the moon) as an economic activity,” said Boucher.
So why was the idea laughable five years ago? Getting off this planet is a herculean challenge, technically and economically. “Some of the present estimates are that a one-litre bottle of water soft-landed on the moon would cost about a quarter of a million dollars,” said Boucher.
But companies are working quickly to reduce that cost. Companies like SpaceX, which streamlines the production and usage of its space vehicles to make them economically viable, are showing that private businesses can get into space more cheaply and efficiently than countries can.
Once you’ve landed on the moon, you’re confronted with more challenges. The ground temperature is -200 C, there’s no atmosphere and solar radiation can damage equipment.
Not all the difficulties are technical, however. If lunar resource extraction becomes an international activity, there may be conflict over who owns those riches.
In 1967, two years before the first humans landed on the moon, the United Nations created the Outer Space Treaty, but that agreement was vague on resource extraction.
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