Posted on 04/04/2014 2:35:10 AM PDT by kingattax
As a child growing up in rural India in the 1960s and 1970s, Naveen Jain would gaze up at the moon and imagine a life beyond his modest surroundings. Today he's still gazing at the moon, but for far different reasons.
Jain, 55, is co-founder of Moon Express, a Mountain View, Calif.-based company that's aiming to send the first commercial robotic spacecraft to the moon next year. This serial entrepreneur-he founded Internet companies Infospace and Intelius-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.
Among the moon's vast riches: gold, cobalt, iron, palladium, platinum, tungsten and helium-3, a gas that can be used in future fusion reactors to provide nuclear power without radioactive waste.
It's an exciting prospect, considering supply on Earth for such rare minerals as palladium-used for electronics and industrial purposes-is finite, pushing prices to $784 an ounce on April 2.
"We went to the moon 50 years ago, yet today we have more computing power with our iPhones than the computers that sent men into space," he said. "That type of exponential technological growth is allowing things to happen that was never possible before."
(Excerpt) Read more at finance.yahoo.com ...
The headline made me think that this person should be surrounded by hundreds of jabbering and giggling, yellow minions. :P
Great goal but how does it make financial sense? Of course he may not care about that.
He might make a few bucks on selling some obscure metals, but will make Trillion$ on the cheese.
Mining the moon will make it lighter, and the Earth’s gravitational field will suck it closer and closer, until it crashes into us! Run!
What about the Amazon Women who live there.....
The Moon is the perfect spot for heavy industry. No concerns about pollution, radioactivity, etc. Given nearly unlimited energy (coming soon one way or the other), a lot of goods could be manufactured there and then shipped to Earth, as was portrayed in "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress".
The Moon is also a natural spaceport, and the logical jumping off point for the rest of the Solar System.
If he sends too many people up there for the harvesting operations, it may capsize.
Thanks kingattax, extra to APoD, others.
Yep. The key to mankind’s expansion in space is low and no gravity mining and manufacturing.
Extremely expensive as a start up but costs fall with increased utilization.
But they could see the Mars rovers.
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