[X] My Assistant

[ljk4-1]

Sudbury To Host Planetary And Terrestrial Mining Sciences Symposium

by Staff Writers

Sudbury, Canada (SPX) Jun 06, 2006

Sudbury is home to the world's largest concentration of mining technology expertise and area companies have been mining the 1.87-billion-year-old impact crater for more than 100 years. At first glance it may be difficult to see what connection that has to the space industry, and why we should care; a closer look reveals not only a strong link, but a compelling economic reason.

http://www.space-travel.com/reports/Sudbur..._Symposium.html

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

That I will believe when I see it. (For that matter, I will believe this "Juna-Glob" probe and its huge flock of penetrators when I see it, too.)

[Guest_DonPMitchell_*]

The Lunar He-3 idea is just plain goofy. There is always a mad rush when NASA or ESA pour money into the feeding trough. If the Russians want to rip people off, they will have to elbow a lot of Westerners out of the way.

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

To quote a friend of mine in the aerospace industry (yes, I do have one friend in the aerospace industry): "The commercialization of space is a Field of Dreams for scam artists." Their philosophy seems to be, "If you propose it, they will come and get swindled."

[Guest_Richard Trigaux_*]

Helium3 on the Moon is extremely diluted into a huge layer of regolith (even admitting that it is not present only into the near surface when solar wind brings it continuously, and not depleted from ages into the deeper layers). Mining it would require to dig and heat a layer of regolithe several kms thick all across the Moon surface, an enterprise several orders of magnitude beyond anything else undertaken on Earth.

Then this He3 would have to be taken back to Earth, at a very high energy cost.

Before this, we would have to land on the Moon millions of trucks, cranes, excavators, and complete factories. The smallest truck is heavier than a LEM... so we would have to land on the Moon thousands, if not millions of Apollo-like missions.

And all this without local source of energy, food, air, water.

Mining the Moon to bring even a sample of He3 is simply millions times larger than what we know to do, both technically and economically. This fusion energy would cost thousand more money and energy that it would produce.

And, last but not least, the face of the Moon would be changed forever. And no way to hide it...


That a manager of a large space corp could enven simply envision such a thing shows us that this space corp is managed by politicians or bureaucrats, not by scientists or technicians, and even not by businessmen.