Mining the Moon
America’s lunar landing last month was another giant leap for humanity – and opens up the prospect of space stations, permanent lunar bases and a new mining industry. Simon Wilson reports
What’s happened?
A spacecraft called Odysseus landed in a crater near the south pole of the Moon late last month, opening up a new chapter in the history of lunar exploration. It was the first US spacecraft to make a soft landing on the Moon in more than half a century (the last was the Apollo 17 crewed mission in 1972). Even more significantly, the robotic lander is financed, built and operated by a private business, the Houston-based start-up Intuitive Machines, rather than a national space agency. The craft, also known as the Nova-C lander, was launched from Nasa’s Kennedy Space Centre at Cape Canaveral, Florida, aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket – and took seven days to complete the 384,000km journey. Its landing marks a breakthrough for the commercial space sector, and potentially a historic milestone in the development of a nascent “lunar economy”. Bill Nelson, the head of Nasa, called it a “new adventure in science, innovation and American leadership in space… a giant leap for all of humanity”.
What’s the lunar economy?
There’s a “bustling field of runners and riders working on plans to explore, settle and develop the Moon”, says Jacqui Goddard in The Times – many of them directed towards collaboration with Nasa’s Artemis programme. After decades of relative lack of interest in the Moon, it’s once again central to America’s space programmes, with plans for a ten-day test voyage with four astronauts (Artemis II, due after September 2025) and then a manned landing on the lunar surface targeted for late 2026 or 2027 (Artemis III). Last month’s IM-1 mission is part of Nasa’s $2.6bn Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) programme in preparation for those and future missions – partnering with private industry to deliver scientific instruments to the lunar surface and test new technologies. The US is also planning to build a “lunar gateway” – a space station from which astronauts can be shuttled to the lunar surface – with the ultimate aim of constructing permanent bases where scientists and geologists can work.
Why all the interest?
Three main drivers. First, geopolitical competition. The original space race took place during the Cold War, in an age of two superpowers, the Soviet Union and the US. But today’s world is more multipolar, and more powers are jostling for prestige and technological leadership. China, Japan and India have all sent an unmanned spacecraft to the Moon within the past five years, and all have plans for more missions. Russia’s lunar ambitions took a knock last year when its Luna 25 craft failed to make it. Meanwhile in the US, national space agency Nasa has thrown open its doors to collaboration with the private sector, fuelling a surge of innovation. Second, technological advances mean that space scientists increasingly see the Moon as a viable future staging post for further manned exploration of the solar system. There are significant quantities of water ice at the Moon’s poles; that’s important because oxygen and hydrogen, the constituent elements of water, can be separated out and used to produce rocket propellant. Third, advances in the same technologies – materials science, new robotics, AI, autonomous systems and 3D printing – mean that some scientists believe it will be possible, within decades, to bring abundant clean energy and mineral resources from the Moon to Earth.
What’s there worth mining?
The Moon was probably formed from the agglomeration of orbiting debris after a Mars-sized planetoid smashed into the Earth in the earliest stages of the solar system about 4.5 billion years ago. That means the Moon has similar geology to Earth. It’s rich in silicates, just like the Earth’s crust, and with a similar abundance of the metals and minerals that humanity needs – for example, to supply catalysts for hydrogen fuel cells for vehicles, or build the rare-metal smart chips that power our machines. We know for sure there are abundant useful minerals including basalt, iron, quartz and silicon. There’s also a good chance that there are mineable deposits of other elements including lithium – crucial to electric vehicles and other green technologies – as well as chlorine, beryllium, zirconium, uranium, thorium and the rare earths. There’s also titanium ore that is ten times richer than that found on Earth. Moreover, if nuclear fusion becomes a reality in the coming decades, an ideal isotope, Helium-3, is rare on Earth but abundant on the Moon. Nasa estimates there are at least a million tonnes of it there – the result of over four billion years of being bombarded by solar wind, with no atmosphere to provide protection.
Is mining really feasible?
The challenges are vast. The Moon’s temperature range is enormous: from 127˚C in full sunlight to minus 173˚C in darkness. Its exosphere does not give protection against radiation from the Sun. The lunar regolith, its surface layer of rock and rubble, throws up massive amounts of dust. There are electrostatic charges to cope with, and gravity is one-sixth that on Earth. But for all that, Nasa is among those who think lunar mining is years away, not decades. By 2032, it wants to have harvested lunar soil and built a processing plant on the lunar surface – and has set itself the goal of mining resources there within ten years. The key to future mining will be what’s known as
“in situ resource utilisation” (ISRU), says Leonard David on Space.com – that is, using what’s already there. Nasa’s current commercial collaborations are all about delivering science and technology onto the lunar landscape that will help it learn how to approach that process. For example, it has awarded funds to the Austin-based firm ICON to develop construction technologies that could help build landing pads, habitats and roads on the Moon using in situ resources. But it’s still very early days. “We are,” says Gerald Sanders of Nasa, “literally just scratching the surface.”
“Nasa has set itself the goal of mining resources from the Moon within ten years”