Moon mining is getting started

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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).

The Moon: legitimate questions still persist.

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The Moon is the natural satellite of the planet Earth. According to the general opinion. And yet, there are some voices claiming that the Moon is not a natural object, but rather an artificial one, created by some advanced alien civilization. However, until proven otherwise, we should accept that the Earth's satellite is still a natural object.

At the same time, the Moon is one of the main "characters" in almost all ancient mythologies and recently, i.e. in the last 50 years, it has became a "character" of a vast contemporary mythology also.

  

A series of certain facts (the somehow abrupt cease of the U.S. Apollo Program in 1975, a Program which, according to the official data, landed no less than 12 people on the Moon; these 40 years that have passed without another human mission to be sent there; those bizarre similarities between the Apollo Program and the facts described by Jules Verne in his novel "From Earth to the Moon"; the fact that no other state except the United States has ever claimed to have landed on the Moon) have given and still continue to give rise a lot of suspicions and questions, which do not seem to have received any totally convincing answers until now.

• Did man ever reach the Moon or was everything just a setup in the context of the Cold War?
• In the same context, being given the international prestige at stake, why did the Soviet Union fail to send a crew on the Moon ? Or did USSR land there but just never acknowledged it  publicly ?
• If the Americans really got there, did they tell us everything about what they found there ?
• Are these 40 years with no flight to the Moon due, as officially stated, to the lack of public interest for such a return, to the high and unjustified costs, to the lack of scientific, economic or political motivation, or to some other reasons that have not been released yet ?
• Is there something happening on the Moon that we are not told about ? Are there any extraterrestrial beings present there ? Or are the Great Powers performing some secret activities there, without informing the public about these ?
• Is there something hidden on the Far Side of the Moon ?
• If only eight years were needed in the 1960s to prepare the first Moon landing, why did President  George Bush in 2004 set 2020 as a deadline for a new lunar landing ? Given the huge technology progress registered from 1960 to date, shouldn't be likely that a new landing to be made at least two times faster and not two times slower ?
• Why did the new U.S. administration in 2010  completely reject the idea of ​​a return on the Moon, but set planet Mars as the goal of a manned mission in 2030 ?

All these questions and probably many other that might exist, have turned the natural satellite of the Earth, as I have already noted above, into a genuine "contemporary myth".

It is obvious that the Conspiracy Theory always made the ​​public delight. Mystery is one of the challenges which the human mind, curious by nature, faces with prompt and intense reactions.

Taking everything into account, where might the truth be lying ?  Arguments seem to be strong on both sides.

On the one hand, it is somehow difficult to accept that all Moon landings of the Apollo Program were just a huge hoax, delivered on a global scale.

On the other hand, one can't help thinking that a 40 years' break in lunar exploration is something very strange. At least to keep us in shape, if not for the scientific benefits as well, man should have got there at least once every 10 years.

In this context, marked by suspicions and uncertainty, a new film is coming to tell us something extra related to this topic.

(to be continued)