HillsdaleCollege

=AFFs=

The below are subject to change, current as of September 20th 2014. Any questions should be directed towards Dr. Doggett or Kevin Ambrose.

 * Kevin Ambrose (Junior)**

The USFG should increase its development of the Earth's moon in minerals, water, and energy, through an act of Congress signed by the President: 1. The USFG will recognize a company's right to own any resources that it mines on the moon. 2. The USFG will legally protect a company's mining operations from outside interference. Funding and enforcement through normal means per Berin Szoka and Jim Dunstan of Space News.


 * Bri Hearn (Junior)**


 * Taylor Wessel (Junior)**

The USFG, through an act of Congress signed by the President, will fully fund and launch a CubeSat as advocated for by the Lunar Water Distribution Mission. Funding and enforcement through normal means.


 * Graham Deese (Sophmore)**

Mandate: The United States Federal Government through an act of congress signed by the president will 1. Adopt an incentives based subsidy program that awards lunar land and guaranteed loans for achieving measurable progress in the lunar mining effort. 2. Specifically, loans will be awarded for developing mining infrastructure on the moon, building lunar bases as mining control centers, successfully using reusable lunar transport vehicles in mining operations, and delivering tonnage to the lunar surface related to mining projects. Funding: $100 Billion over 20 years Enforcement through normal means


 * Sigrid Kiledal (Sophmore)**


 * Rachael Behr (Freshman)**


 * Adrienne** **Carrier** **(Freshman)**


 * Duncan Voyles** **(Freshman)**

Mandate: The United States Federal Government through an act of congress signed by the president will 1. Adopt an incentives based subsidy program that awards lunar land and guaranteed loans for achieving measurable progress in the lunar mining effort. 2. Specifically, loans will be awarded for developing mining infrastructure on the moon, building lunar bases as mining control centers, successfully using reusable lunar transport vehicles in mining operations, and delivering tonnage to the lunar surface related to mining projects. Funding: $100 Billion over 20 years Enforcement through normal means


 * Razi Lane** **(Freshman)**

The USFG should increase its development of the Earth's moon in minerals, water, and energy, through an act of Congress signed by the President: 1. The USFG will recognize a company's right to own any resources that it mines on the moon. 2. The USFG will legally protect a company's mining operations from outside interference. Funding and enforcement through normal means per Berin Szoka and Jim Dunstan of Space News.


 * Allie Howell** **(Freshman)**

Thu 7/3/2014 10:14 PM
 * Email Citation From Dr. Peter Ness**
 * ‪ Phness  ||

To: mdoggett@hillsdale.edu
 * || Matthew Doggett; ||  ||
 * || Matthew Doggett; ||  ||

You forwarded this message on 7/4/2014 1:52. Hi Matthew,

The article was submitted in July 2013 to the NASA White paper on manned flights to the moon. These are very good questions and require more than just a simple response.

1. Do you think that the moon has enough minerals to mine?

The moon contains many elements (~15) which are abundant as compared to the same metals found on earth, and which will eventually be mined – but don’t hold your breath. Some metals, such as nickel (Ni), aluminum (Al), and magnesium (Mg) are found in quantities such that, if they were found on earth, they would already be mined. However, the cost to mine them on the moon, even with significant changes in the way they are processed is in general around 5,000 times higher than it would cost to do so on earth. Rocket costs need to fall to around double that of commercial airliners before mining on the moon or asteroids is economic. This precludes mining for many decades. Other metals such as gold are rare, and only exist on the moon in trace (background) quantities.

The issue is not whether there are sufficient metals to mine on the moon; but rather, whether it is possible to upgrade/concentrate those metals that do exist to a level where they can be transported to earth where they can then be refined. Plus, large volumes of material need to be mined in order to extract only a small metal fraction. For instance, if someone wanted to extract platinum they would need to process around 3 to 5 million tonnes of rock each year in order to extract only a few hundred kilos of impure platinum ore, which would need to be refined to a pure form (platinum briquette) on earth. This is a little hard to do using the wheelbarrow-scale miners developed using NASA funding.

The equipment NASA, the ESA and others are claiming they are developing for lunar mining can extract less than a few tonnes of unprocessed rock a year and even if scaled up are impractical so could not be used to mine on the moon due to basic design flaws. The metallurgical processes required to extract metals even on earth require copious amounts of water, without which it is impossible to separate (liberate)minerals from the host rock. In other words, there are a great many problems and few of those working on the idea of mining the moon have the knowledge required to even know about these problems let alone to make mining happen. The idea of space elevators sounds great on face value but the current designs come up way short and are not at all practical. Mineral resources are spread out over the moon but a space elevator is fixed in nature, by a tether. Fly rock from blasting on the moon would cover an area up to 60 km radius from a mine so would risk serious damage to any space elevator. Moving rock that distance even on earth is unprecedented and is very expensive. Unless such space elevators can be adapted to enable them to be mobile it will probably be the high-cost solution and act to preclude mining for many decades. The money is better spend on mineral exploration programs, which anyone educated person knows always comes first in the mining process.

2. Do you think under current law that if the minerals on the moon were mined that they would flood the world market crashing prices?

That would certainly exist with mining asteroids for specific metals such as the platinum group elements and cobalt. The Japanese Steel mills and US government are very keen to mine asteroids for iron, but if one were to find and mine a 1km diameter M-type asteroid composed mostly of iron (less than a dozen exist) the minerals are not separated so to mine iron ore you have to extract around 15 other metals. The value of a tonne of iron is roughly ~$150/ tonne. It currently costs $1000/kg to move equipment into space (in simple terms if it costs 150,000 times more to mine it than you get from selling it then it is not economic to do so). In each case, one would mine the asteroid based on the highest value metal which exists (e.g. platinum). However, assuming it is economic (it might not be until 2065); if you were to mine more than 5% of the world’s production of platinum and sell it you would flood the market and platinum prices would come crashing down and mines on earth would close. To avoid going bankrupt the miner would then increase production of the next highest value metal (such as palladium). The problem with palladium is that is that as the volume of platinum sold so does the volume of palladium, so the market would be flooded and prices would already be falling before you could ramp up palladium volumes. The same thing happens with all the other platinum group metals (Rh, Ro, Ir, Os etc). In order to mine sufficient iron ore to satisfy ONLY the Japanese market you would need to mine 110 million tonnes of iron each year, but since the quantity of Fe in an M-type asteroid varies between 20% and 55% Fe (iron). You would need to return between 200 and 400 million tonnes of rock to earth each year (triple this for the US or Europe) – the equivalent of bringing back a single 150 meter diameter asteroid each year. This is clearly impractical in our lifetime, and way too dangerous. A space elevator designed to return samples to earth can handle only 30 tonnes per cycle, so one would require thousands to satisfy only the Japanese market for iron ore. Each space elevator costs around 1.3 trillion USD.

To cause commodity prices for any specific metal (mined from the moon, mars or asteroids) to crash one would ONLY need to increase supply of that metal by more than 5 to 10%. Typically, when a new iron ore, platinum group, alumina, coal, copper, or nickel is developed I would analyze the demand and supply curves to ascertain the maximum volume the metal can be mined. Plus, I would calculate the increases (ramp up) that can be made each year without diluting/affecting the prices. This is, in general, around 5% of the entire market share in year one, and would be increased (ramped up) to around 8 to 10% when in full production. Only in rare cases, for very specific metals where only a handful of mines supplies the entire world demand, would this be higher. In contrast, for instance gold, a single mine supplies less than 0.01% of the world’s supply, so the metal volume (eg of gold) provided by a single mine has no impact on process. However, there is no gold on the moon. It is at background levels.

On the moon, most metals cannot be processed to the refined level for many decades so at least 1% of the rock (possibly much more) would need to be shipped back to earth for refining. The costs might preclude large-scale mining for many decades. Mining any metal at volumes where more than 5-10% of the world’s demand is supplied would be impossible for many decades; thus, the idea that mining the moon would cause prices to crash is highly unlikely. Supplying more than 5-10% of world demand from the moon is about as likely as New Guinea winning the World Cup soccer this century. Some people claim that they can mine He3+ (a gas) from the moon. In this specific case, in the remote likelihood they were successful, the He3+ price would plummet overnight and they would go broke unless they can create an very large artificial demand. It might be more practical and cheaper to collect He3+ from Jupiter’s atmosphere by scooping it up.

You need to realize that few of those people who advocate mining metals from the moon, mars, or asteroids have ever worked in mines. They have no working or operational knowledge or experience of what is required. Most of those advocating the use of space elevators for mining on the moon know little about mining. The closest most people who advocate mining in space have come to a real operating mine is from 30,000 feet in a Boeing 747. Thus, most of what you read about in the paper or what comes out of those who want to do it is highly speculative, at best. Plus, to be honest, it is mostly about people who want to get rich getting their grubby little hands on NASA funding.

The Apollo missions serve as a reminder of the right and wrong way to do things. Despite repeated complaints by Shoemaker (for over 6 years) NASA management believed that astronauts could be trained to collect samples from the moon (they thought you could teach a monkey to do anything). However, the astronauts kept bringing back only one rock type (anorthosite) from the moon. Eventually, NASA listened to Shoemaker and compromised by sending a single geologist, on one single mission (Schmidt) which must have frustrated Shoemaker somewhat. Of the +480 rock samples collected from the lunar and Apollo landers, that is the only mission where we have a valid representative sample and can analyze the data to search for mineral anomalies. The data from ALL other Apollo missions are biased and swamped by an unrepresentative sampling – a situation caused by NASA management arrogance, incompetence, ego and a self-fulfilling prophecy. Had NASA listened to Shoemaker to begin with we would already have the basis of a solid lunar exploration sampling program. As it stands, the entire process has to be redone in the future and at considerable cost, substantially diluting the value of the Apollo missions primary goal.

After correctly concluding that Shoemaker was a genius, NASA changed their approach and now spends a great amount of money on geological space research, but they are still back in the same Apollo way of thinking. The people interested in mining the moon these days are no less ignorant or egotistical than those who ignored Shoemaker. In order to extract metals from the moon requires a major exploration program, and comprehensive sampling and drilling programs. That is: before you can mine, or design equipment, or even talk about mining costs or space elevators you need to ascertain which metals can be extracted economically by doing the prerequisite geological drilling and sampling programs to highlight the ore bodies. Then, once that is done you design the mines, THEN design mining and metallurgical equipment, and THEN design the space elevators and return sample vehicles. The problem is that people want to do the reverse, which is the best way to lock in failure – so far with great success. It takes 20 years to develop large iron ore, copper, and coal deposits on earth and 5-10 years to develop large platinum group, nickel or uranium deposits for mining on earth. Most of this work is drilling and metallurgical test work and equipment/process design. Each metal and each mine differs in its requirements. Plus, it takes 3-5 years after that to get a mine up and running and a further 5 years to ramp it up to full production. Yet, we constantly read about how we will be mining the moon within a decade; which, given that things take much longer to achieve in space and the lack of interest in hiring people who do have the expertise is just pie in the sky.

I hope this helps. I’m sorry that I never went into anything in any detail, but I think I answered your question.

Regards Dr. Peter K Ness