A self-sustaining mechanized colony that mines and exports resources from the Moon could be a reality within a generation, helping to meet a demand for materials key to innovation on Earth
Amid the recent boom in extraterrestrial exploration, a new frontier for private companies and space agencies appears to have emerged: mining the Moon for precious resources.
Once thought to be a beautiful but largely barren rock, the Moon is now believed by some to be a treasure trove of rich materials that could play a vital role in the Earth’s future.
To understand what you can find on the Moon, you need to understand its history. We now think the Moon formed out of debris from a Mars-sized protoplanet (Theia) hitting the proto-Earth. So, it started very hot. High amounts of radioactive elements and tidal heating kept it hot for a long time. Additionally, many asteroid impacts heated whatever they hit. The dark areas on the Moon we call “Maria” (seas) are craters filled with lava that later cooled to basalt providing more evidence of how hot the Moon was.
Amid all this activity, the Moon lost everything with a boiling point below many hundreds of degrees (volatiles) — atmosphere, water, and low boiling solids. The escape velocity from the Moon reached low temperature, and once the atmosphere was gone, solar wind stripped the remaining volatiles. So, what’s left on the Moon are “refractories”, minerals with a high boiling point.
Being small, the Moon cooled quickly once the causes for being hot dissipated. It didn’t have volcanism or plate tectonics, and without water, you don’t get concentrated ores as we do on the Earth. Also, asteroid impacts throw stuff around which led to the surface soil getting pretty well mixed, further reducing the chances for concentrated ores.
Gold and palladium are “Platinum Group Metals” -PGM for short. They are below iron, nickel and, cobalt on the Periodic table. Therefore, they are compatible and mix well with them. The base metals sink to the core of large bodies and take the PGMs with them. That’s why they are rare on Earth — they mostly sank to the core. Some protoplanets got smashed up, exposing pieces of their cores. We call those “metallic” asteroids because they are mostly iron and nickel.
Probably all of the platinum group metals, deposited on the Moon could be through asteroid impacts.
Considering that Earth has only 2 small regions where PGMs can be extracted without fully destroying the ecosystem, finding a deposit on the Moon would be a win.
There’s evidence of plenty more mundane stuff like titanium, aluminum, etc. on Moon not only for exporting to Earth but rare earth minerals vital to everything from wind turbines and hybrid cars to cruise missiles and the ubiquitous smartphone. Vast troves of hydrogen could be used for fuel are also likely present on moon, opening the door to ever-further exploration and exploitation.
But despite its hidden treasure, is mining the Moon a viable commercial project?
People aren’t all that excited because it’s just such a daunting project. To mine the Moon, you need to have people living on the Moon. To do that, you have to take everything humans need to survive to the Moon. Things like air, water, food, soil to grow crops in, more water for the crops, fertilizer, and all of the resources to build the facilities to house everything.
The Moon also is pretty hard as a place to live. The lunar day lasts almost a month (a little over 29 days), which means you’re going to have weeks without sunlight. Every month. There’s also nearly zero atmosphere or magnetic field, so not only does every single tiny meteor that comes whizzing by mean a potential missile that will zip through whatever you’ve built and make a hole to suck out all your precious air, and the things you build there have to be able to withstand temperature changes from about 250 degrees Fahrenheit during the day to over -400 degrees at night, it also means that you are exposed to much higher levels of radiation all the time, making your long term health a nightmare. Also, the lower gravity on the Moon will wreak havoc on your bones, making you unhealthier. The weaker gravity also poses problems for anyone living on the Moon who wants to have children, since lower gravity will probably cause ectopic pregnancies.
And even if you figure out how to overcome all that, you have to ship all that to the Moon at over $40,000 per kilogram. It doesn’t make the prospect of profitable mining look very good.
But before any ethical discussion, there is much work ahead to confirm how feasible mining on the Moon is. While we might not be experiencing a lunar gold rush just yet, the world’s best minds are firing on a fascinating aspect of this new chapter of mankind’s journey to the stars. And if feasible, it could be our key to the galaxy.