antet 2

How far can we go ?

"I suppose that if we would reach the edge of the world, we would find there somebody who is going beyond."

- Henry David Thoreau –

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"Through Giving You Shall Receive"

Find out who said this, see why he said it and, then, go beyond this starting point.



24 ian. 2012

Moon mining is getting started

www.sxc.hu
The children who enthusiastically read Jules Verne in the early 80s of the last century were imagining that around the year 2000 the Moon will be  swarming with human activity. Compared with these dreams, which at that time seemed achievable even to adults, the reality of 2012 (nobody landed on the Moon during all this period) can be somehow disappointing.

But in the last few years, some news has come to reinforce those expectations a little: an American private company is planning to set up what many generations have dreamt of for so long, namely a level of permanent human activity on the Moon. Although this is not exactly what we would have expected to happen in the year 2016 (the older public lived with the expectations that a true human colony on Moon would be established around this moment in human history), the achievement of this objective will be an important step forward, anyway.

Actually, with the start of 2016 Moon Express Inc., a private company, intends to set the basis of a  permanent Moon mining activity, using a robot which will exploit one of the natural resources found there in abundance, namely the rare earth elements. Unfortunately, the purpose of this project is not to settle a mining colony on the Moon, but to man a hover aircraft vehicle that will carry out scientific missions, customer-designed missions and, most importantly, business missions.

In other words, this seems to be the first step towards the privatization of outer space. The whole philosophy behind this strategy is that the private sector should take over those space activities that already have the needed technology at their disposal (technology which has been previously developed by the public sector). By doing this, by being relieved of these tasks, public agencies (like NASA) could focus their efforts on creating new technologies that will allow humanity to go forward into space (Mars, asteroids, etc). To put it simply, NASA does not withdraw from the Moon, but lets the private sector take care of this.

And since we talk about the private sector, we must say that we talk about business here: the initiators of this project plan to obtain a profit of billions from this activity. According to their view, the money will come from the sale of the ore extracted there, as well as from other services provided to individuals (transportation  to and placement on the Moon of several things belonging to private persons, like messages, photos, etc).

Copyright 2011 Moon Express, Inc
All in all, even the image of a little robot working on  the Moon is not exactly what we would have expected to see after a lapse of more than 40 years from the first moon-landing, however, in the opinion of Naveen Jain, the co-founder of Moon Express Inc., the entire Moon will be full of such machines working hard on that terrain in the not too distant future.

But till that moment, in the next article, we will try to see how a genuine lunar mining colony is actually supposed to look like  (Moon, 2009, Directed by: Duncan Jones).