This Company Plans to Mine the Moon — and It’s Not Alone

A view of Shackleton crater at the moon's south pole. (Image credit: NASA)

The first-ever private mining operation on the moon is scheduled to kick off in 2020, when a landing craft sent by Florida-based Moon Express will ferry a single scoop of lunar dirt and rocks back to Earth.

Unlike the three governments that have led lunar missions — the United States, the Soviet Union, and China — the owners of this private firm have something history-making in mind for that little ball of extraterrestrial soil: They plan to sell it.

"It will instantly become the most valuable and scarcest material on Earth," says Bob Richards, the CEO of Moon Express. "We'll make some of it available to scientific research. But we also plan to commoditize it ourselves."

Moon Express is gearing up to become the first company to ever transport a commercial asset from space back to Earth. But it's not alone.

"We believe that the first trillionaires will be made from space resources," says Richards.

The moon holds significant amounts of a special type of a futuristic fuel source called helium-3 — enough, some say, to meet all of Earth's power demand for thousands of years providing scientists can master the fusion power technology to utilize it.

Most, however, are focused on a resource that's commonplace on Earth: water.

Water, space entrepreneurs say, will be the key space commodity for an economy expanding into the solar system — both because it can sustain life as drinking water and breathable air, and because it can be broken down into hydrogen and oxygen to make rocket fuel.

"Water is like the oil of the solar system," said Richards. "The moon could become a gas station in the sky."

One client that's already signed up is the moon-burial company Celestis, which offers to send cremated human remains to the surface of the moon for a starting price of $12,500.

In 2016 Moon Express became the first private company in history to receive permission from the US Federal Aviation Administration to travel beyond Earth's orbit and land a craft on the moon.

Selling part of that scoop to private interests — for example, as moon gems for jewelry for the ultra-rich — will set an important precedent. The international Outer Space Treaty of 1967 says no country can claim sovereignty over extraterrestrial territory. But in 2015 President Barack Obama signed a law granting private citizens the rights to resources recovered from space.

The company's first mission, slated for this year, will be in part an attempt to win the Google Lunar XPrize. The competition offers $20 million to the first private company able to land a rover on the moon's surface, travel 500 meters, and then broadcast hi-definition images back to Earth.

Another company fielding a team for the XPrize, which also plans to eventually tap moon water, is Japan's ispace Inc.

In December, ispace signed a memorandum of understanding with Japan's national space agency, JAXA, for the "mining, transport, and use of resources on the moon," according to a company statement.

China is also eyeing moon resources — especially helium-3.

As an energy source, helium-3 is as alluring as it is elusive: a non-radioactive agent that wouldn't produce dangerous waste. The isotope is released by the sun and carried through the cosmos on solar winds that are blocked by Earth's atmosphere, but collect on the surface of the moon.

As a result, the moon is "so rich" in helium-3, it could "solve human beings' energy demand for around 10,000 years at least," a top Chinese scientific advisor to the country's moon exploration program, Professor Ouyang Ziyuan, told the BBC.

One of the top proponents of lunar helium-3 is Harrison Schmitt, a geologist who walked on the moon during NASA's Apollo 17 mission and wrote a 2006 book advocating lunar helium-3 mining called Return to the Moon.

Others, however, are deeply skeptical — even if the necessary fusion technology, which has long eluded researchers, is mastered.

"I do not see this as being an economic solution to Earth's energy needs," Ian Crawford of the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Birkbeck College, University of London, said in an email. "The problem is that the abundance is very low, of the order 10 parts per billion by mass in even the most abundant regions."

Richards of Moon Express said it's too soon to specify the most valuable resource on the moon.

"It would be speculative and predictive to say which specific element is going to be the game-changer," he said. "Pick your favorite spice."

For now, he says, the key target is water — which, to be sure, can be found on frozen asteroids circling the sun as well.

"Water, we believe, is relatively easy to harvest from asteroid materials," said Tumlinson.

If all goes according to plan, "by the middle-20s, we'd be producing serious quantities of resources," he said.

"You can concentrate that solar energy and heat up the surface of the asteroid and literally bake off the water in the same way you'd bake a clay pot," says CEO Chris Lewicki.

In space, "you can build these huge structures we see in movies and science fiction," said Lewicki. "The resource that will allow us to do that is the metal that's on asteroids. We can use technology like 3D printing. We can print up a structure in space that never has to hold itself up on Earth, never has to take a violent rocket ride."

A total of $1.8 billion was invested in space ventures in 2015 — more than in the prior 15 years combined, according to the Tauri Group consultancy. More than 50 venture capital firms invested in space deals in 2015, the most of any year, the group found.

The moon, said Richards, is like Earth's 8th continent, and it's largely unexplored.

"We're like early pioneers," he said, "looking at a whole new world."

Originally published on Seeker.

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