Billionaire Teams Up With NASA To Mine The Moon

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You know you have way too much money when you decide you are just going to team up with NASA to mine the moon for precious metals. :eek:

"Clearly, NASA has an amazing amount of expertise when it comes to getting to the moon, and it wants to pass that knowledge on to a company like ours that has the best chance of being successful," said Jain, a serial entrepreneur who also founded Internet companies Infospace and Intelius. He believes that the moon holds precious metals and rare minerals that can be brought back to help address Earth's energy, health and resource challenges.
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The Time Machine movie... I still think about that when I hear stuff like that. They made the moon a tourist area and drilled too far into it and BOOM. It broke apart and fucked the Earth up....

How financially secure is this? Spend trillions to get there. Will the ROI be good enough to support the endeavor? I'd guess no right now. Until those metals become much more rare.... Unless they have a good way to go....
 
founded Internet companies Infospace and Intelius
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Hey if some billionaire wants to give NASA a bunch of money to do stuff when he doesn't understand cost/profit ratios, then hey more power to him!
 
So when we go and mine precious metals and other materials from outside Earth's ecosystem and environment, then bring it back to Earth, wouldn't that pave the way to upsetting Earth's ecosystem as things decay? Just look at how poorly we handle things already
 
Mining the moon and asteroids will be essential in any space based economy. It'll much cheaper to get it off the moon then off the earth. I would suspect that's the end game here. Be the first to claim rights to it and be ahead of any others in experience in exploiting whatever it is they find.

As far as any of it finding it's way back to earth. I suppose some would, but when compared to the amount of space debris that burns up in the atmosphere(mostly) every year, I doubt it would come close.
 
Cerulean said:
So when we go and mine precious metals and other materials from outside Earth's ecosystem and environment, then bring it back to Earth, wouldn't that pave the way to upsetting Earth's ecosystem as things decay? Just look at how poorly we handle things already
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The moon was created by debris from the Earth post collision, therefore it should be pretty compatible with our system.
 
the moon does many things for the earth...

1. our bio clock.... sleep wake cycles...
2. tides....


If their going to mine the moon, will they be responsible enough to do it in a way that doesn't screw it up to the point it will affect us here back on earth.

Judging by history i remain doubtful ....
 
Can't think of the name but there was a movie out not long ago about some outfit that was mining the moon. Maybe they got their idea from that.
 
the problem with this picture is that there is to many billionaires and multi multi millionaires that dont know what to do with their money
 
Leave the moon alone.
Fuck with something else that has far less likelihood of causing problems we cant recover from.
 
Mine moon, build giant solar power plant on orbit from moon minerals, beam power to earth, clean power! I guess if you really want to put something to orbit, it better be some asteroid. They are small and valuable, filled with valuable ores like nothing we have here on earth.
 
I think we're better off learning how to tow asteroids into orbit around Earth, mine them and toss them off. As other poster mentioned, we shouldn't be screwing up our one and only moon.
 
CPY said:
Mine moon, build giant solar power plant on orbit from moon minerals, beam power to earth, clean power! I guess if you really want to put something to orbit, it better be some asteroid. They are small and valuable, filled with valuable ores like nothing we have here on earth.
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The problem with beaming power from space is when it goes wrong.
Beam it to the wrong place and it will be erase that part of the world pretty quick.
Whether it be an accident or someone gaining control for corrupt purpose, way too much risk when you consider we cant recover from that and it could devastate the population problem and economies.

Bringing in asteroids etc isnt as bad as long as motion compensations are taken care of and they are far enough away if left in orbit.
Wouldnt want the planet to start drifting around or mini moons having too great an effect.
 
Asteroid mining is so expensive that all the metal retrieved, whenever it happens, will be used in space.

Also, water is worth more in space than metals, so they will go after water first.

But that doesn't create sexy headlines, so they talk about metals.
 
Nenu said:
Leave the moon alone.
Fuck with something else that has far less likelihood of causing problems we cant recover from.
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Imagine if the US government would've followed through with their plan to nuke the moon decades ago. That would've been nice...
 
Moogle Stiltzkin said:
the moon does many things for the earth...

1. our bio clock.... sleep wake cycles...
2. tides....


If their going to mine the moon, will they be responsible enough to do it in a way that doesn't screw it up to the point it will affect us here back on earth.

Judging by history i remain doubtful ....
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The Moon's mass is about 73,600,000,000,000,000,000,000 kilograms (http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/moonfact.html) and lots of it are probably materials that aren't very valuable or cost-effective to extract and then send back to Earth so I think pretty much any mining operation, even a very, very big one, won't adversely impact the Moon's influence on the planet even if it were running for many, many lifetimes. In addition to that, because of the logistics/distance problems, reaching escape velocity with a load of mining equipment, and lack of atmosphere any mining efforts are going to be pretty limited in scale because of the problems with sustaining the lives of people living there that would run the operation. You can prolly not lose any sleep over something like this causing disasters on a planetary scale.
 
I like how people understand things like the moon so little that they honestly believe we could negatively affect things like it's orbit by mining.
 
Dekoth-E- said:
I like how people understand things like the moon so little that they honestly believe we could negatively affect things like it's orbit by mining.
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No, but there is always the chance they will summon Cthulu.
 
This should present an interesting problem for the tree huggers. No fucking tree's.

Bwahahahaha.
 
Being that gold came from astroids, the moon is probably a "gold mine". Mining it won't hurt anything. God people are ignorant.
 
aardvark sandwich said:
Asteroid mining is so expensive that all the metal retrieved, whenever it happens, will be used in space.

Also, water is worth more in space than metals, so they will go after water first.

But that doesn't create sexy headlines, so they talk about metals.
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Pretty sure any kind of mining would be automated, so no need to have humans on the spot.

Most asteroids have very weak gravity so coming back isn't very expensive at all.
 
dceremuga said:
Being that gold came from astroids, the moon is probably a "gold mine". Mining it won't hurt anything. God people are ignorant.
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Gold is valuable because it's somewhat rare. If the Moon were a gold mine and they mined enough to be profitable, you'd flood the Earth's supply with it, and the value would diminish.
 
Ur_Mom said:
Gold is valuable because it's somewhat rare. If the Moon were a gold mine and they mined enough to be profitable, you'd flood the Earth's supply with it, and the value would diminish.
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Good, can we do that with Diamonds too, please?
 
krogen said:
Pretty sure any kind of mining would be automated, so no need to have humans on the spot.

Most asteroids have very weak gravity so coming back isn't very expensive at all.
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Automation is not cheap. The machines have to be built differently to function against space dust, and just the obstacles of pining back to earth are enormous. The machines would ping, have to operate complex tasks flawlessly on their own for quite a while, then ping again. Obviously the moon is a bit different there, but not much.

The water would not be for human consumption. It would be for the machines and infrastructure.
 
Do some of you actually think we'll be able to damage the Moon in such a way as to affect life on Earth? We can't blow the thing up—do you realize how much energy it would take to over come the Moon's gravitational binding? We could put every last nuke we have in the middle of it and set them all off and it would have about as much effect on the Moon's structural integrity as Armstrong farting during his moonwalk.
 
Stripmine the moon for all I care. It's not like there are any cute animals up there to disturb. Depending on what they find up there it could really affect commodities markets. Can you imagine if they found obsurd amounts of Gold or Platinum up there? The markets would crash so fast the "buy gold" people wouldn't have time to weave a cohesive narrative as to why their theories about gold's intrinsic value (other than it's manufacturing uses it doesn't have any) don't really make sense.
 
The geologic processes that put Gold etc on the surface of the Earth to be mined, never happened on the Moon. This idiot flunks basic science.

There is gold and heavy metals, but they are locked in the solid core of the moon .... that darn gravity thing.

Plus there is a treaty forbidding all manner of activities as regards the Moon, this dipshits keep coming out of the woodwork thinking oh yeah, I'll just take it and none of the other 7 billion people on Earth will have a say in it.
 
xX_Jack_Carver_Xx said:
The geologic processes that put Gold etc on the surface of the Earth to be mined, never happened on the Moon. This idiot flunks basic science.

There is gold and heavy metals, but they are locked in the solid core of the moon .... that darn gravity thing.

Plus there is a treaty forbidding all manner of activities as regards the Moon, this dipshits keep coming out of the woodwork thinking oh yeah, I'll just take it and none of the other 7 billion people on Earth will have a say in it.
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Treaties don't mean shit the treaty is only respected so long as no one thinks its worth breaking the treaty or to slow down some schmuck the flipping second someone figures out how to extract anything and make a profit on the moon the treaty will fall apart or loop holes will be placed in it to make things work. Like Japan and their scientific whaling vessels. They do a lot of science on whales. =]
 
rudy said:
Treaties don't mean shit the treaty is only respected so long as no one thinks its worth breaking the treaty or to slow down some schmuck the flipping second someone figures out how to extract anything and make a profit on the moon the treaty will fall apart or loop holes will be placed in it to make things work. Like Japan and their scientific whaling vessels. They do a lot of science on whales. =]
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That's because no government really cares about whaling, so no one cares to truly enforce it.

If there are huge profits to be made from the moon, the people who are capable of ripping the profit will of course try to nullify it but those who are not able to do it will do everything they can to enforce it. We may even go to war over the moon.

So it's certainly very naive of the author to think someone can just go mine the moon without anyone else having a say about it.
 
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