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Plan B. Crash dozens of asteroids onto the moon at a few designated locations. (Use rocks that might hit the earth or pass fairly close). Offer free mining righ
by trukterious 8y ago
Plan B. Crash dozens of asteroids onto the moon at a few designated locations. (Use rocks that might hit the earth or pass fairly close). Offer free mining rights to companies on a first-there-first-served basis.
- jandrese 8y agoWhy crash asteroids on the Moon when its surface is covered in impact craters from ancient strikes. The moon is geologically dead and has no atmosphere, so anything kicked up in those old impacts should still be around.
- trukterious 8y agoHmm, interesting. I was thinking that we could mine fresh debris from the asteroids themselves, in concentrated form. Plus saving the earth, of course.
- minitoar 8y agoGP's point is that plenty of asteroids have crashed into the moon in a recent enough time frame that the debris is still "fresh". After all, there's not much erosion on the moon.
- trukterious 8y agoYes but not all in the same place, so the ore would presumably be less concentrated?
- anticensor 8y agoIt does have a bit of erosion due to micrometeorites.
- hinkley 8y agoThe moon is covered with regolith from ancient strikes. If the rock is already crushed you can skip a few steps in the smelting process.
- bsder 8y agoWhy? The asteroids aren't really composed of anything that useful. In addition, the total mass of the asteroid belt is something like 4% of the moon's (and half of that mass is in the 4 largest asteroids). You would be better off just mining the moon.
- trukterious 8y agoApparently there's stuff like gold, iridium, silver, osmium, palladium, platinum, rhenium, rhodium, ruthenium and tungsten. These might be transported back to earth. Plus there's iron, cobalt, manganese, molybdenum, nickel, aluminium, and titanium for construction of moon settlements and factories. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_mining https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_mining