| FEATURE - Moon mining: want to invest in the final frontier? |
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By Jeremy Smith
LONDON, Nov 22 (Reuters) - Space, the last frontier
remaining to be truly explored and exploited by man. Vast
mineral riches are believed to lie in its cold depths,
especially on the moon -- an untapped resource just waiting for
its first commercial landing.
Could it ever be possible to replenish the earth's supplies
of gemstones and little-known rare metals such as osmium and
rhodium by sending humans, or even robots, into space to set up
mining ventures on the inhospitable surface of the moon?
An increasing number of private firms see no reason to wait
for the world's governments to take the lead and are racing to
launch their own space mining missions.
"Governments have no reason to go back to the moon. They've
been there, there's no political reason to go back. But there
are a lot of private reasons to go back," said Ian Randal
Strock, a director of U.S.-based Artemis Society International
(ASI).
ASI is helping sponsor a project to build a commercial
manned moon base and plans its first lunar flight in the next 10
years. According to Strock, technology is not the problem --
rather, just how to raise the massive amounts of cash required.
"If we had sufficient money, then it's just a matter of
getting the pieces together, getting a launch and we're there.
The big delay in any project to the moon is funding," he said.
"We're looking at $1.5 billion for that first flight," he
said. "We have four companies up and running and making money,
and we're looking to send up a robotic camera in two years."
The United Nations' 1979 Moon Treaty, one of several
international outer space agreements, attempted to define the
scope of private space activity. However, it was never ratified
by some major powers such as Russia and the United States.
The treaty stipulated that any wealth obtained from the moon
by any space-faring nation was to be distributed to all the
people of the world. One clause, referring to space resources as
the "common heritage of mankind", has been taken by private
firms as legitimising efforts to mine on the moon and asteroids.
The handful of private firms competing to be the first to
establish commercial lunar mining are convinced of a lucrative
market for whatever they might eventually ship back to Earth.
To back up their claims, they cite a famous sale of Russian
lunar samples held at a New York Sotheby's auction in 1993,
where a pebble of moon rock weighing less than one carat fetched
an astounding $442,000, or $2,200 a milligram.
According to Applied Space Resources (ASR), a moon mission
costing less than $100 million could return a quantity of lunar
material with enough demand in the marketplace to make the
return on investment attractive to financial backers.
A private company based in New York state, ASR aims to send
an unmanned spacecraft to an unexplored region of the moon and
return the first lunar samples to earth in more than 25 years.
"We have been at this for four years now -- we can do this
technologically and we believe that the market exists," said
Denise Norris, ASR's president. "The biggest hurdle is that we
need about three to three and a half years to integrate
everything.
"If everything moves on schedule, we would be launching
within five years," she said, adding that ASR would soon be
looking for $4 million in financing.
SCARCE METALS
Scientists believe the elements making up most of the earth
are also present on the moon and make up most of its
composition. Analysis of lunar rock samples indicates a wide
variety of elements, with oxygen and silicon being relatively
plentiful.
Germanium, molybdenum, tungsten, rhenium and gold rank among
the rarer metals present, in small percentages. Cobalt, nickel,
iron, aluminium, magnesium, manganese, calcium, sodium and
titanium also feature.
But of more immediate commercial interest are the six
elements known as the Platinum Group Metals (PGMs) -- iridium,
osmium, palladium, platinum, rhodium and ruthenium.
Among the world's scarcest metals, the PGMs possess unique
chemical and physical qualities that make them vital industrial
materials. They are especially valued for their catalytic
functions, conductivity and resistance to corrosion.
"There are certain minerals and precious metals that we are
going to find where the supply is going to drop off soon," said
ASR's Norris. "I believe that the platinum group metals are
going to be a real problem on earth, with fuel-cell technology."
Fuel-cells, which are being developed to operate without
fossil fuels, use around 10 times more platinum than internal
combustion engines, mainly as a catalyst. If they were to be in
widespread use, platinum demand would rocket.
Norris added, "but it'd be extremely foolish to say we're
going to make a ton of money selling platinum group metals here.
The resources are there and there's a lot of stuff up there,"
she said, adding that this was mostly from asteroid impacts on
the moon.
PRACTICAL PROBLEMS
However, the daunting number of practical problems facing a
would-be moon miner may prove insurmountable, scientists say.
The largest obstacle is the lack of water, used in large
quantities in most earth mining operations but only believed to
exist as ice at the lunar poles. Water has been responsible for
shaping the earth with its alluvial strata and mineral deposits.
Notwithstanding a similar lack of oxygen, which does exist
on the moon but is bound up in compounds that are hard to break
down, the low-gravity situation means that robotic mining would
probably be more sustainable than sending humans into space.
"Nobody is going to think of doing (moon) mining with human
beings," said Richard Taylor, a council member of the British
Interplanetary Society.
"We aren't going to have little men with tin hats holding
picks in their hands," he said. "All this exploitation of
asteroid material will be robotic and remote."
Finding the actual mineral deposits could also prove tricky.
While the earth concentrates minerals in specific areas by
dint of volcanic eruptions, the moon is volcanically inactive so
new ways of locating minerals would have to be found.
So far, there is little hard evidence about in what form or
where minerals are found on the moon, although scientists have
made educated guesses based upon studies of lunar soil and rock
samples.
"What you want is a means of establishing what exists where,
and whether there are local concentrations. That requires very
comprehensive mineral mapping," Taylor said.
"The moon has a semi-molten core but we're not going to see
crystal formation or those types of veining that you would see
on the earth with precious metals," said ASR's Norris. "There is
no crystallisation in the same way that we see on earth."
EXORBITANT COSTS
Apart from the serious practical problems involved with any
activity on the lunar surface, the first obstacle for companies
looking to mine on the moon is cost -- and return on investment.
Experts say the cost of transporting items into space is
exorbitant, ranging between $2,000 and $3,000 per pound of
weight, meaning that any lunar bases would really have to be
able to procure their necessities from space.
"If there was a layer of gold a foot thick floating over the
earth at an altitude at which we could send up a shuttle to go
up and collect, it wouldn't be worth doing it," said Taylor.
"This is for the simple reason that it would cost more per
gram to go up and bring the gold back than the gold would
actually fetch," he said. "And a lot of these metals have high
values on earth only because they are rare."
The real key to lunar mining, Taylor said, was to reduce the
cost of sending a craft into space so that its operators could
afford to have a vehicle which went up partially empty into
space and came back partially empty.
21 NOV 2001 23:30:11