Private company wins U.S. clearance to fly to the moon - Polidicks

Mining the moon or any space thingy would be a hard task because unlike on Earth where you can keep all the rocks in one area and retrieve the resources from them if you start mining in space it means you have to bring all the waste masterial back to Earth before you recover any of the resources. [editline]4th August 2016[/editline] Also the cost of mining/drilling is insane even on Earth, like it costs something crazy like $100 million to drill a hole at sea lol

[QUOTE=Recurracy;50824503]excuse me but i think its gonna mess with the orbit of the moon if you mess with its mass and that brings another giant amount of fuck-huge issues we shouldnt be dealing with, it'd just stack on top of the issues we already have at the moment, and that's just because we've done something as (at first sight) insignificant as burning fossil fuels. if that alone is capable of causing so much disruption, imagine what it would mean if you mine out huge chunks of our only natural sattelite, which just so happens to dictate a lot of the oceans, and our own orbit let us leave one thing in peace for once[/QUOTE] Even if we mined the moon at 10x the rate we currently mine the earth, and brought it all back, even after centuries there would be no noticeable change in its mass except to the most sensitive of measuring equipment.

[QUOTE=Complifusedv2;50825620]Mining the moon or any space thingy would be a hard task because unlike on Earth where you can keep all the rocks in one area and retrieve the resources from them if you start mining in space it means you have to bring all the waste masterial back to Earth before you recover any of the resources.[/QUOTE]Or you could process the ore on-site, it has a few interesting challenges but there's literally no environmental concerns so you can be as dirty as you want. [QUOTE]Also the cost of mining/drilling is insane even on Earth, like it costs something crazy like $100 million to drill a hole at sea lol[/QUOTE]Not really a comparable scenario, once in space the cost of operations is basically nonexistent if you can utilize water ice for fuel. Hell, I could cobble together an SUV-sized robotic miner in my garage but the issue is getting it from my garage and into LEO and beyond. Launch costs are the first hurdle, commercial spaceflight relied heavily on piggybacking on NASA's goodwill for decades before somebody got the bright idea to develop something that didn't take up NASA's time or resources. There's another hurdle, remember that financial risk I talked about earlier? Investors are going to be worried about that, so even if the mining ship got from the surface to LEO and then to the mining site there's still so much that can go wrong. That's where the real costs of asteroid mining hide, it's that high risk venture coupled with a potentially catastrophic market destabilization by simply [I]engaging in the act of mining[/I] that makes up the invisible fence. We send shit up into space all the time and just about anyone can build a functional spacecraft, but it's those little niggling costs and risks that scare off pretty much all investors right away. Meanwhile drilling at sea could actually be extremely cheap, but like with a lot of industries the true cost of a service or product is inflated simply because of the way we do things.

This whole thread is the reason this process took so long. This wasn't like they printed some papers out from the city hall and handed them in and just waited. Someone had to tell someone important "Hey..these guys want access to the fuckin moon" and that important guy was all "Well..Shit, So like we gotta have rules so they don't just be dicks you know?..." and so begins months of government lawyers in conference rooms for months deciding whats important to regulate and not and how much to regulate it and whether this applies to this mission or all their missions and whether permission can be rescinded because..hey..once you leave the orbit how ya gonna stop em?

[QUOTE=CapLaPorte;50823244]Space mining and resource extraction won't become mainstream until resources are required for the sake of having resources, rather than to be resold for profit. Mostly because as detailed above the cost of getting up, mining, and getting back down (and pioneering ways to do all that no less) is so much higher than what you'd actually make in profits bar finding some magical adamantium substance or some shit.[/QUOTE] Pretty much this. The only way we'll ever mine the moon for resources is when money is no longer in the equation (Think Star Trek), or, the survival of our race depends on it. That's it

I always thought that the moon and mars and everything else should be treated as either a separate country and every country from earth that claims a bit would be added to the country of moon or mars and then have a neutral port which means at a later time things can be built like tethers and it befits everyone not just a single country. However that's all wishful thinking and i'm sure there's a better way of doing it.

[QUOTE=Recurracy;50824503]excuse me but i think its gonna mess with the orbit of the moon if you mess with its mass and that brings another giant amount of fuck-huge issues we shouldnt be dealing with, it'd just stack on top of the issues we already have at the moment, and that's just because we've done something as (at first sight) insignificant as burning fossil fuels. if that alone is capable of causing so much disruption, imagine what it would mean if you mine out huge chunks of our only natural sattelite, which just so happens to dictate a lot of the oceans, and our own orbit let us leave one thing in peace for once[/QUOTE] The ignorance of this statement makes my head hurt. Surely, if mining the Moon would "mess with its mass", just imagine how the Earth would be after all the work we've done to it. To significantly reduce the mass of the moon to a point where it's a detriment to the Earth, you would need to do a [B]lot[/B] of expensive work, practically stripping it of its top layers or alternatively hollowing it out, neither of which are feasible. If there's anything to be concerned about it's that companies might try and abuse the moon to put monetary gain over the progression of humanity. Don't get me wrong, the monetisation of space exploration is essential for gaining the funds we need to progress but there need to be caps on what can be done, otherwise you'll have each random company dropping probes/tiny habitats on bodies across the Solar System and going "hurr we dun claimed it guys now pay up to use it".

[QUOTE=ZombieWaffle;50825373]there's no flag on the moon, they took it back when they returned to earth[/QUOTE] No, they are still up there. First one got knocked over though according to Buzz.

[QUOTE=OvB;50822712]It wouldn't be recognized by anyone and the rest of the world would be upset with you, but when it comes down to it, ownership goes to the one that can defend it. If you had with you a big fleet of super space marines, then no one could really stop you from claiming Mars as your own.[/QUOTE] Would you like to build a big fleet of super space marines with me?

[QUOTE=SirJon;50827011]Would you like to build a big fleet of super space marines with me?[/QUOTE] Not you, you aren't American.

[QUOTE=Zenreon117;50825478]If we mined the moon then we would have to build ontop of it otherwise we would fuck with the mass. Certainly not in a year, or 5, but after 100 years of advanced tech mining, the mass will start to change, and the seas will be affected. 1000 years later it might be the new global warming.[/QUOTE] I did the math once that if we mined as much mass from the moon as we've mined iron in all of human history you still couldn't measure a real difference

[QUOTE=Matthew0505;50833358]It'd be far cheaper to set up a processing system on the moon, barring some breakthrough in rocket technology like fusion nuclear thermal rockets.[/QUOTE] We only just got machinery. Give us some time to improve our ore/d ratio.