Scientist Explains How Moon Mining Would Work

[Daniel] 50 years ago, Neil Armstrong

and Buzz Aldrin made history when they became

the first humans to walk on the moon's surface.

[Neil] That's one small step for man,

one giant leap for mankind.

Today, companies and governments

are thinking about going back,

but for a slightly different reason.

They wanna mine the moon.

These organizations are working on technologies

that can use raw resources from the lunar surface

for everything from life support to rocket fuel.

How feasible is this?

And is it even legal?

My name is Angel Abbud-Madrid,

I'm the Director of the Center for Space Resources

at the Colorado School of Mines.

We spoke with Angel Abbud-Madrid to learn more.

So can you tell us a little bit about lunar mining?

This is an idea that's been around for a while,

what has led to this resurgence

of interest in mining the moon?

The important thing to understand

about space resources is the word space.

These are resources that are in space,

and that we want to utilize in space.

When we talk space resources,

is a variety of things that we can use from space.

Some of them are concrete, like metals,

and oxygen, and water, but some of them

are intangible resources like solar energy,

like microgravity, ultra-high vacuums.

You do not travel from Denver to New York City

and bring a big tank of gas to get there

and also to return, you refuel your vehicle as you go along,

and you use the resources in your destination.

Same thing in space.

That idea has been around since the beginning

of the space age in the 1960s.

When the NASA realized that they were gonna have

humans on the surface of the moon,

they would probably need some resources there,

for example oxygen to breathe, or water to drink.

During the Apollo years, that was not necessary,

because they were gonna be there

for just a few hours and then come back.

But after that, that idea has stayed,

and now it's becoming more real, and more important,

especially as we're talking about staying there

for weeks and months at a time.

When a lot of people hear about lunar mining,

the first thing that pops into their head is,

why go all the way to the moon

when we have these resources on earth.

Do you think there's a strong economic case,

or perhaps even a political case

to go to the moon to extract these resources?

It's not about bringing the resources to earth,

it's about using the resources

in space for space applications.

Why?

Because one of the most expensive things

about space exploration is transportation.

Lifting up ourselves from the ground

is an extensive and energy-intensive operation.

If we could find the propellant that we need in space

so we don't have to carry it from earth,

that would be the way to go.

You mentioned several different resources

that could be found on the moon.

Can you tell us a little bit

about what those resources are?

45% of the moon is oxygen,

oxygen that is tied to the rocks.

We can use it for breathing or as a propellant.

The regions on the poles of the moon

that have never seen the light of the sun,

they have accumulated water from comets and asteroids

that have deposited the ice there and that can be utilized

for water, for drinking purposes, or growing plants,

or splitting to hydrogen and oxygen,

which is the most energetic rocket propellant known.

There's metals all over the surface,

could be iron, could be titanium, aluminum, magnesium,

all of those metals that we use

for construction and for making parts.

It's also silicon, silicon that is important

for making solar cells.

The other element that is important

is just the lunar soil itself.

This will be good for construction, for habitats,

could be used for 3D printing,

if you wanna have tools, spare parts,

so that's another very important resource.

The moon presents several challenges

that aren't found on earth.

It has a low gravity environment,

very harsh radiation, extremely low temperatures

and extremely high temperatures.

So how are engineers thinking

about overcoming these challenges?

Most of the operations at the beginning

will be done robotically,

we won't have humans on the surface.

So we will have to have either remotely controlled,

or fully-autonomous machines.

They will have to be small, because we are only limited

to a certain mass that we can get to the moon.

With the reduced gravity level,

your traction goes down a little bit.

In terms of power, we have solar power.

So we will have to learn how to capture that,

or provide other sources of energy such as nuclear power.

And what is the status of these robots right now?

Is this something that actually exists

and is ready to fly next year,

or is this still mostly science fiction?

Just like on earth, it goes through

a sequence of operations.

First is the exploration, identification of the resources,

then you gonna extract, process, manufacture.

We're gonna go by the same sequence that we follow on earth.

So identifying the resources is expected to happen

in the next two to five years.

In fact, there's already payloads that are being planned

for the next couple of years that will carry to the moon

some instruments to identifying the resource,

how much oxygen do we have, how much water

is on those permanently shadowed regions of the moon.

Those will be followed in the next five years and beyond

by demonstrations of technology.

Now let's demonstrate the technology,

we know where the resource is, let's see

how much oxygen we can extract, how we can store it.

This will be done at a scale in which,

at the same time that we're demonstrating the technology,

can start being used by humans

that will be on the surface of the moon,

and it coincides nicely with plans

to have humans by 2024 and beyond.

Large-scale operations, once we start setting plants

that will collect oxygen, and metals, and water

at scales in which we will need it

for large production of propellants and the like,

that's more in the 10 to 15 years.

But a lot is needed to be done before you do that.

Several technologies have been developed

to a point of a prototype,

some of those things can be ready to be tested.

Other things will require further technology development

as we learn more and more the state of the resource

and the technology that will be needed to extract.

So it sounds like there's going to have to be

some exploratory missions to find where these resources are,

what are the best regions to extract them from.

Is this something that you think is gonna be undertaken

by governments first, or do you think corporations

and private interests are going to be leading

the lunar gold rush so to speak?

This is something that most probably will be accomplished

by governments, by space agencies,

that are interested in these resources

for exploration and for sustaining humans.

The private space sector can come in to help

on the technologies that will be used

to excavate it, to extract them.

Companies on earth have plenty of experience here,

and they can be utilized by our space agencies

to continue with extraction of elements.

One of the major stumbling blocks

to actually bringing this into reality

is going to be policy, and so I was curious to know,

is mining the moon even legal?

The outer space treaty that was signed

and ratified by more than 100 countries

specifically stated a country cannot own any celestial body.

But left out was the possibility to extract the resources

without owning the planetary body.

Two countries have already taken

a unilateral approach to this,

first the United States in 2015

with the Commercial Space Act.

It makes it clear that any company that resides

in the United States can go ahead and extract the resources.

That was followed by Luxembourg in Europe,

the rest of the world is also asking,

how is it that everybody can get involved,

so that minimized conflicts, so all of those questions

are now out there in terms of the legal,

and they will have to be settled before we also go out

and extract resources in a large scale.

We may use them at the beginning,

if humans have to survive there for a few weeks,

we may extract the oxygen.

We've actually been there, and the United States

have been there without claiming ownership of the moon,

and so the same thing will happen at the beginning

with some resources that will be essential

for just survival, but when we start extracting it

on a large scale, we will have to come up

with a coherent legal framework.

With mining on earth, environmental groups

take it very seriously, a lot of people say

it defaces the earth, and this is conceivably something

that could happen on the moon.

If these operations get to become large-scale,

it might deface the moon.

Is this something that organizations

that are pursuing resource extraction

in space are thinking about, and how might we minimize

the effects on the lunar environment?

The moon has been an object of adoration

for millennia, and for all cultures.

We see very clearly the moon.

It's the only object that we see in a large scale.

There's been already concerns about the impact

on historic places like Apollo 11,

and how mining operations are gonna affect that.

So there's definitely an environmental component.

That's not gonna be an issue, I mean,

the mining operations we're talking about to sustain humans

are minuscule to anything that we have on earth.

When we talk about mining water from the lunar poles,

we're gonna be extracting water from a place

that not only we cannot see, it has not seen the light

of the sun for billions of years.

So you will never get to see what happens in there,

and we're talking about a very small operation

to conduct exploration that we wanna do in the,

you know, several decades from now.

At some point, if this becomes large enough

that you have large operations

that will require a lot of excavation and extraction,

there may be an effect by then,

but that's something that will have to be considered,

again, just like the legal aspects,

how much we wanna have this done,

or where should it happen so that it doesn't cause...

Raise any more concerns.

Angel, thank you so much for joining us today

and telling us more about how we're going to mine the moon.

It is a pleasure to be here Daniel,

to share some of what is happening

on plans to extract resources from the moon and beyond.

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