Lunar boom: we'll soon mine the Moon

"As history has repeatedly shown, where there are valuable minerals to be unearthed, adventurous humans will arrive in droves – even if it means battling extreme conditions and risking life and limb. So what will happen when the next great “gold rush” in our history is quite literally out of this world…" A landscape of the imagination, in this case inspired by Mark Maxwell and JAXA, shows part of a larger study for Astrobotic Technology a generation or two beyond their present production line. In the deep lunar south their notional "Moon Digger" vehicles are clearing, perhaps in some places sintering, a new landscape more familiar to human civilization, extracting billions of years of space sediment along the way [Mark Maxwell/Astrobotic/JAXA]..

Leonhard Bernold

Associate Professor of Engineering
University of New South Wales
theconversation.edu.au

As history has repeatedly shown, where there are valuable minerals to be unearthed, adventurous humans will arrive in droves – even if it means battling extreme conditions and risking life and limb.

So what will happen when the next great “gold rush” in our history is quite literally out of this world? And what kind of technology would be needed for the mining? After many years of trying, I believe a have a workable answer to the second of these questions – but what about the first?

Business analysts may poke fun at the “impossibly” expensive cost of mining nearby celestial bodies such as asteroids, or even the moon, but these pursuits are not beyond the realm of possibility.

Returning to the moon for the purposes of mining will require new technologies and new ways of thinking, and this extends to the conventional business model. We cannot write these pursuits off based on high cost alone, especially given the hidden treasures to be found.

So, will we ever see mining trucks hauling material on the moon or on the asteroids? Quite simply, no.

It is a common mistake made by engineers, including myself, to project terrestrial technology on to the moon. After all, the moon’s environment is vastly different to that of Earth.

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