Can anyone make money on the moon? | Hacker News Reader

Can anyone make money on the moon?

nytimes.com

107 pointsjaredwiener98 comments

Funny, I was just listening to a podcast where Andy Weir (author of The Martian) was interviewed about his new book, regarding a potential city on the moon.

To justify a book about that Weir had to think of an economic reason why there would be a city on the moon, because cities need economic rationales. He theorized that the price of space travel had been driven down enough that it could support a tourist economy, so the economics of a Moon city could be modeled on Caribbean tourist cities. Conveniently, 85% of the moon rocks are anorthite- which smelts into aluminum, oxygen, and silicon among other things. All of which would be very helpful for building a moon city.

Weir didn't have much to say about international treaties mentioned in this NYT article. But a key connection between the article and how he ask and answers the question is that they both seem to regard a budding space tourism industry as a foundational next step.

He's actually written "a 3,000-word (and spoiler-free) treatise laying out the economics behind his fictional moon city" available on business insider [1]

edit: I read this last week and 30 minutes later signed up to audiable to get it as my free book (ebook reader broke, amazon delivery too slow). It's an enjoyable book, but i wouldn't go into it expecting another Martian - it's fluffier.

Apart from that, if I couldn't afford the $70k holiday cost, then I'd probably have to get a temp job working up there for a bit - though the economics of migrating between aren't discussed.

[1] http://uk.businessinsider.com/andy-weir-artemis-moon-city-ec...

One thing I'd worry about working on the noon would be finding myself in the sort of indentured servitude many cruise line workers and domestic helpers find themselves across the world.

I bet you won't be making $20/hour on the moon, if certain people have their way.

Asimov was really good for questions like this. I bet somewhere out there he wrote about why people would go to such places.

-edit- He even wrote a book titled “space colonies”. First I’ve heard of it.

I think aging wealthy folks will move to space in droves once the amenities are developed. Low-G is great on the knees.

Pending the trip up there doesn't pulverize your bones.

Getting to space is a relatively peaceful experience. It's the coming back down part that can be a bit more intense since 'aggressive atmospheric braking' is one of the most efficient forms of reentry. To put some numbers here the Space Shuttle only hit about 3g during exit. For comparison roller coasters can briefly hit around 6gs.

Technology like SpaceX's BFR could potentially bring the g forces even lower. As its current design entails in orbit refueling, efficiency in launch is not all that important. The cost of fuel, relative to the costs involved in space flight, is negligible.

> Weir didn't have much to say about international treaties mentioned in this NYT article

The assumption about these treaties, at least in the private space circles in which I used to find myself, was that they will be broken and re-written. (There is strategy in the timing of said breach, which is why everyone who matters is happy to leave it in place for now.)

I listened to this as well. Another interesting thing he mentioned was that you could use calcium as a conductor on the moon. Apparently it is a better conductor than copper and is abundantly available. It doesn’t work on earth because it reacts poorly with the oxygen atmosphere.

The economic case for the moon is harvesting He3, once you have figured out fusion of course.

This is a science-fiction premise, and not entirely accurate (although I did enjoy watching Moon). Without Star Trek level tech to mine and move, the moon isn’t an economically viable source of He3.

We have everything we need for fusion here on Earth, except the know-how.

One economic case for the moon is as a source of mass in Earth orbit for staging exploration/utilisation of the rest of space. Low gravity and no atmosphere makes it more attractive for raw materials than Earth is. Large Andy Weir style human settlement isn't required; this is a case for automated moon-based facilities for harvesting raw materials, performing whatever automated processing/fabbing is required, then launching them to where they're actually needed for considerably less than the current $25k/kg cost of getting them out of Earth's gravity well.

Ultimately the only thing that absolutely needs to come all the way up out of Earth's gravity is canned homo sapiens; automated production of everything else can be arranged remotely.

A tourist-based space economy is bollocks.

"Space tourism is not a market, merely a way to kill rich wastrels until parents, heirs and trustees organize to stop them." http://launchloop.com/UpwardBound Keith Lofstrom

There's real money and economy up there. Introduction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGcvv3683Os

Highly recommend Isaac Arthur's well-researched video on industrializing the Moon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGcvv3683Os

Separately, if nobody knows how to say yes, can't Moon Express just launch first and ask permission later? Or launch from a different country? I doubt the USSR is going to rise from the dead to enforce the treaty…

Guys, nobody is going to make any money on the moon anytime soon. Or by mining asteroids, either, although that argument is more interesting, since (some) asteroids contain relatively pure rare elements. The moon, by contrast, is mostly just sand.

With current technology, it costs — round ballpark figures — about $25,000 PER KILOGRAM to launch mass into geosynchronous orbit, the highest orbit for which there is any current commercial launch market. If SpaceX really gets going, which it might, that number will come down. But it won't come exponentially down. It might get cut in half. But it's still going to be really really expensive to get aything to the moon, including the infrastucture and propellant that you would need in order to get things back from the moon. Put another way, that's about $800 an ounce at current prices, and $400 an ounce in the optimistic ten year scenario. Bricks launched into space are literally as expensive as gold bars.

And that's just launch cost. It isn't the cost of building the thing you're launching. Of course, the non-recurring engineering, fabrication, and test costs vary dramatically depending on the complexity of the spacecraft being built, but again, in very general terms, a geosynchronous communications satellite, which is the single spacecraft type that most closely resembles a commodity, as they are built on an assembly line, with relatively little non-recurring engineering and standardized designs and parts, those cost about $300 million each.

For a grand total cost, of building and launching a plain vanilla geo commsat, of half a billion dollars. And then you have to operate the thing. Any spacecraft mission of significant complexity - the complexity associated with manned spaceflight or planetary mining - is going to require round the clock teams of hundreds of engineers. So you're talking billions more dollars per year to operate.

If you're thinking of launching a man-rated lunar spacecraft, which you'd need for lunar tourism, multiply that by about thirty and you'd be at the low end of a decent estimate. A lunar prospector capable of returning samples - just samples, not bulk materials - is going to be in the low billions, plus billions more to run. A full on linar mining infrastructure is, again, tens of billions. At least. Probably hundreds of billions.

There is just nothing on the moon that's worth that much. In particular, there's nothing there that wouldn't be orders of magnitude less expensive - and much less risky, which is important from an investor perspective - to simply mine or manufacture on earth. You can dig a lot of mines for ten billion dollars.

There are many questions to this line of thinking. Technology marches ahead, and cumulative advancements are large even in comparison to early 1990, when NASA conducted studies have shown possibility for manned return to the Moon for about a billion dollars. Similarly, goals to go there now include space tourism - something not heard of even in late 1990 - or mining the Moon water, which we know more about today than when Clementine flew. Even such a boring thing as oxygen can be marketable after offering it in quantity on a convenient orbit for many customers to take.

When SpaceX demonstrated the expenses which it took to develop and fly Falcon-1 with supporting infrastructure, they beat the existing cost models by about a factor of four. Similarly here reaching the Moon can turn out easier than thought, and reasons to go there could become better than used to believe, as soon as some favorable conditions, like in 2002 when SpaceX was born, will be met.

Right, which is why the asteroid mining discussion is interesting — there are minerals in asteroids that have significant value, and if you could get the cost of access to space low enough, it might make economic sense to go get them. I'm skeptical that the economics of asteroid mining are going to close in the next fifty years, but there is at least a coherent argument for it.

But the moon is just a big rock. As far as we know, there's nothing there with any intrinsic value - the only economic value of the moon is that it's out of earth's gravity well. So if you had a sufficiently robust asteroid mining operation, or something, then basing it or staging it on the moon might make some sense. But the moon would only have secondary value in that scenario, and you have to postulate some space resource with really high primary value in order to justify being on the moon.

The average cost of a deep sea mining rig can vary between $20mm and as much as $1 billion.... comparatively those costs may not seem too high in the not too distant future for moon mining.

Edit: Source: https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/061115/how-do-avera...

Yeah, but that's a one-time cost. Once you build the rig, getting it on site isn't all that expensive, comparatively. And you can relatively easily resupply it, repair it, and upgrade it.

Whereas a space mining operation requires additional billion-dollar launches every time you need to resupply fuel or parts. Plus, as mentioned above - as far as we know, there isn't anything on the moon of significant primary value.

Surely the easiest way to make money on the Moon is by threatening kinetic bombardment of Earth?

Tanstaafl

For those confused about the relevance of fegu's comment. That acronym was popularized by Robert Heinlein's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress", which includes kinetic bombardment of Earth by lunar inhabitants as a plot point.

Your comment was opaque, but was the first thing I thought of too

Seems very unlikely that for the foreseeable future, any Moon->Earth threat of kinetic bombardment could stand against an Earth->Moon threat of nukes and cutting off supplies. There is a fundamental asymmetry in that rendering Earth completely uninhabitable to humans would almost amount to terraforming a planet, whereas a Moon colony is rendered uninhabitable by, among other approaches, making a small number of strategically-placed holes in buildings.

I saw Dr Strangelove, certainly anyone who plans to (seriously) threaten the Earth with moon-launched WMDs would include some kind of dead man's switch in their plan.

What I think is this: so the UN (of Earth) acquiesce to your demand for a trillion dollars and mining rights to Ganymede. What next? It's not like you can go back to Earth and enjoy your new wealth.

Which is most vulnerable. Planet Earth or a small bubble of air on the Moon?

Earth is a bigger target, in terms of both mass and size, compared to the Moon and especially compared to a small bubble of air thereon. So almost any weapons would need to be far more precise against a lunar colony than against Earth.

* * * * *

If we were talking about nukes, things would of course get far more interesting.

Nukes aimed at Earth would only have to detonate somewhere in the atmosphere, if there were enough of them.

By contrast, nukes aimed at this lunar air bubble would have to hit the bubble precisely; lacking a direct hit or an ambient atmosphere, nukes only produce radiation, blinding light ... and seismic activity if they detonate somewhere on the Moon's surface. No aerial shockwave, no convection, much less fallout, no climate changes.

Also, since Earth has greater mass, Earthbound projectiles would need less energy to escape the Moon and deorbit to Earth's atmosphere, compared to the energy that Moonbound projectiles would need to escape Earth and deorbit onto the Moon's surface.

If only we had developed the technology to target weapons precisely, or something like a warhead that breaks up into millions of fragments to hit a large area. Or if nuclear weapons emitted thermal radiation across a large area. Oh well. I suppose the Moon wins.

Earth. They're ("we're") at the bottom of a steeper gravity well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moon_Is_a_Harsh_Mistress

If you do the orbital math you realize there's no advantage to putting weapons on the moon.

If there was, 50 years after we acquired the capability to get there it would probably be bristling with fortresses.

I don't think there is any benefit to moon-based weapons that space-based weapons don't already have, and we already have ICBMs and FOBSs.

Various moon benefits:

- Relatively close and accessible (as opposed to the other planets)

- Seemingly stable platform to build, other wise we continue to rocket everything up from earth.

- Raw Materials - stuff to build more space vehicles, structures, etc.

- Lack of air - May help foster newer/cheaper materials and other processing

- Low Gravity - Also may factor into developing new materials and bigger objects.

- Lack of thick atmosphere - for astronomy, earth visualization.

- for data centers - potentially better cooling, or energy (solar) less susceptible to intrusion, security, etc. Lack of air might be a plus too.

To add upon your comment, the moon could also act as an interplanetary shipyard. With the low gravity and stablity, as well as proximity to earth for raw materials and man power. Assuming it isn't completely automated.

Iirc, Isaac Arthur (I know him as a sci-fi YouTuber) has done numerous videos on how we could become an interplanetary/interstellar species. One of those videos covered the use of the moon to those ends.

I thought the moon had been ruled out due to lack of resources to compensate for the gravity well.

The amount of fuel it takes to get to Mars and the Moon is almost the same but the Moon has a bunch of aluminum and oxygen relatively easily obtainable. These two things can react energetically and be used in a hybrid rocket which could be used to shuttle stuff from the Moon to Earth. The stuff exists we just have to use it.

Sounds like the exports would be transportation related. Wonder if solar or nuclear would be more viable.

Many people seem to be dramatically overestimating our knowledge of the moon's composition. When did we definitively proven there was substantial amounts of water on the moon? Most would probably think the answer would be the 60s or the 70s. In reality the answer is 2009 [1].

And similarly China's recent landing on the moon has reshaped our understanding of the moon as it turns out the geography of the area in which they landed was substantially different than that on which the US/USSR landed in the 60s/70s. [2] That discovery came in 2014!

The point I'm getting at here is that it's always wise to keep our ignorance in mind. Deep penetrating radar and other technologies can provide substantial information, but it's still limited. Our lack of knowledge is an ongoing and major constraint. And the interesting thing is that the more we learn, the more desirable the moon seems to become.

And of course it also goes the other way. The best people making the best decisions can come to decisions that later seem less than correct. The most recent example there being the discovery that the colored streaks on Mars being briney water -- it turns out it may indeed just be sand after all.

[1] - https://www.space.com/7328-official-water-moon.html

[2] - https://phys.org/news/2015-03-china-yutu-lunar-rover-moon.ht...

There’s no carbon on the moon. Unless you can harvest large numbers of comets, habitation at scale is impossible.

Stupid question. Is carbon only mandatory if you want long term sustainable agriculture? Or is it necessary for something else?

Presumably you'd CO2 to feed plants, so the plants could produce oxygen for breathing purposes. You'd also need carbon to create organic (aka carbon based) food. At a minimum, carbon will part of any system that includes people. A sustainable system would need some way to recycle carbon.

All the carbon on the moon would absolutely be recycled, much like it is on Earth.

So even if you have to ship all of it there, it's only a one time cost.

We are carbon based life forms, our being alive is just a fancy way of taking carbon in a solid form (food) and turning it in to CO2 for plants. So you either ship food and O2 to the moon and CO2 back to Earth, or you build up a supply and start the cycle there.

Presumably if you are running some sort of hotel, you ship enough O2 and food to cover your guests travel and stay. Then only ship back what they need to stay alive on the ride home. Eventually you build up a large enough supply that you don't have to ship as much, reducing costs.

Expensive, not impossible.

I'm guessing that a small number of carbon-bearing asteroids could easily support a fairly large population. Asteroids contain a lot of material.

http://www.philipmetzger.com/blog/type-of-asteroid-to-mine-p...

But then, why are you moving them to the Moon?

For use by the people who will live there? It'd be easier than building a habitat on or in the asteroid, although that will likely happen at some point as well.

It’s far easier to live in asteroids than the moon. The energy cost of moving them is enormous, and you can develop them without paying the cost of the moons gravity well.

That may be the case. However, for tourism (which will probably be important for a lunar economy), travel time will be a major consideration. The moon wins hands down on that aspect.

Also, I imagine there will be a space elevator on the moon which reduces the gravity cost substantially. I believe it is possible to build one with today's technology (unlike on Earth).

Space elevators on the Moon are 100% possible with Kevlar and steel. The additional advantage to a space elevator is that at a point you get past escape velocity. This means if you let go you would escape the Moon without any propellant and have a free return. This can be capitalized on every month to have a large amount of supplies shipped from the Moon to Earth with half of their fuel cost paid by electricity instead of rockets.

If you are going to move an asteroid, you can get it on a much better position than the Moon.

About the space elevator, anything you can imagine on the Moon would be easier on an asteroid.

Except for moon tourism.

One does not need carbon on the moon to make the moon profitable.

1) No guarantee people would be required on site. 2) If people are required on site you tightly control the carbon cycle, this is the same thing that occurs on earth, just that the earth is doing this on a scale many orders of magnitude larger.

The whole thing is made out of aluminum! It's low-g. We don't need steel.

The potential I see on the moon is:

- having a base to store things for later use.

- a space elevator on the moon should be simpler than one on earth.

- water could be extracted from the moon and shipped to earth orbit.

- more convenient extra vehicular activities.

Some ways to make money on the moon.

1. Oxigen factories for Mars shuttles. Although Musk's vision for Mars makes sense as it is, it becomes much more economical if you add oxygen production on the Moon. You can manufacture the oxygen locally on Mars (via the Sebatier process), but you need some factories to do that. It's going to be much cheaper to build much larger factories on the Moon, and ship the oxygen on Low Mars Orbit. There are lots of numbers you can look at, but here's a quick comparison. The BFR second stage, planned to weigh 2100T, will be able to deliver about 170T of payload to the surface of Mars and about 980T to the surface of the Moon (almost 6 times as much). It's going to take much fewer trips to build a factory on the Moon, plus, if anything breaks, you can ship a replacement in days, rather than months or years.

2. Build solar panels on the Moon and ship them to Mars. In a few decades it will be cost competitive with building and shipping from Earth. Compared to building locally on Mars, it will probably always be cheaper.

3. Build nuclear rockets (not missiles) [1]. It's unlikely we will have the appetite to launch such rockets from the Earth in the next 50 years or so, due to the risk of breakup during launch. On the Moon however, everything above ground is continuously exposed to massive radiation (mainly from the Sun), so a nuclear fallout will not change things too much.

If we ever want to do true deep space exploration, we need to move beyond chemical rockets. The Moon can help us get there.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_thermal_rocket

I would think they would have their very own trade system if it isn’t just a government funded experiment. Although I predict it would take a long time to establish a trade system and one that involves cash or credits

Helium-3 (He3) is gas that has the potential to be used as a fuel in future nuclear fusion power plants. There is very little helium-3 available on the Earth. However, there are thought to be significant supplies on the Moon. Several governments have subsequently signalled their intention to go to the Moon to mine helium-3 as a fuel supply.

http://www.explainingthefuture.com/helium3.html

The problem with this is that even if you did successfully move helium 3 to earth or LEO what would you do with it ?

A better thing to do would be to mine for metals and make stuff with it (satellites / or outposts).

I wonder if it would be very useful in a moon base to actually launch further into the universe considering the lower gravity well. With a single fusion power point and just using moon materials to make a single launch point outside of earth. You wouldn't need to 'colonize' the moon in that a single base could make more practical sense.

That being said, how much He-3 do we really need for fusion? I was under the impression fusion reactions lasted a very long time considering the energy output to mass used, so would mining the substance once or twice suffice for as many fusion reactors as we would need on Earth? Total energy usage across the globe was about 18.0 terawatts in 2013, and apparently the ITER fusion reactor would produce 500 Megawatts of power using a 1/2 gram of hydrogen per year [1], so if Helium 3 was more efficient, we would need hardly any to cover global power generation, and even plan for future power usage.

[1] https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/123837-500mw-from-half-a...

From the article you linked,

"ITER is hoping to produce 500 megawatts over 1,000 seconds from just 50 megawatts of input power and 0.5 grams of hydrogen fuel."

(My emphasis.) The half-gram of fuel is to run for minutes, not months.

With optimistic assumptions, complete fusion of one gram of He-3 (with deuterium) can produce

1/3 * 6.02 * 10^23 * 18.354 * 4.4505 * 10^-20 = 163913 kWh

of primary (thermal) energy. If world primary energy demand is 18 terawatts, that's

18 * 10^9 * 24 * 365 = 157680000000000 kWh annually.

157680000000000 / 163913 = 961973729 grams (962 metric tons) of He-3 per year to cover all primary energy demand.

I'm highly skeptical, for three reasons:

1) He3 fusion requres much higher temperatures than other kinds of fusion, so it's even farther away from our grasp than ordinary fusion. This makes the "low-radiation" aspects of He3 irrelevant.

2) There isn't that short supply of He3 on earth, in particular there is quite a bit in natural gas, something like 30 kg produced annually just in the US at current rates.

3) You need a huge installation on the moon processing millions of tons of regolith. Basically large scale strip mining on the moon. Big, energy demanding mechanical equipment that requires frequent maintenance and spare parts and human intervention (just ask any regular miner) while being subjected to extreme temperature swings doesn't sound like something I'd want to put in space. And we haven't even mentioned the environmentalists and the relevant space treaties yet.

Why would environmentalists care? There are no known native living organisms.

I can see someone caring about scarring the landscape, but that's a bit orthogonal to environmentalism.

Required reading: www.thespacereview.com/article/2834/1

tl:dr There's absolutely no indication this is practical. We don't know how to fuse He3, it's probably impractical to mine it, and "He3 mining on the moon" is more of scifi wishful thinking mentioned offhand in exactly the manner you just did, than a serious engineering proposal.

> Helium-3 (He3) is gas that has the potential to be used as a fuel in future nuclear fusion power plants.

There is potential, but this is for very far in the future.

Getting an energy-positive fusion reaction going in ITER is still at minimum 20 years away - and it uses the simpler to fuse Deuterium+Tritium fuel. Getting commercial fusion power plants, and ones that fuse Helium-3 instead, might easily be 50-100 years away.

With the price of wind and solar energy dropping fast, people and politicians are getting less and less interested in funding fusion research at all.

My prediction is that nobody will be willing to pay for Helium-3 mining on the Moon in this century.

Mining the Moon to fuel fusion reactors with helium 3 is a cockamamie scheme for the foreseeable future. First, nobody has made a fusion reactor that produces net electricity even with the least demanding fuel (deuterium-tritium). He-3-deuterium fusion requires significantly higher temperatures. Second, if He-3 did become a valuable fuel, it can be manufactured here on Earth by irradiating lithium with neutrons, just like tritium; it's what tritium decays to. Finally, the lunar regolith concentrations of He-3 are at the parts per billion level.

The latest He-3 prices I can find are around $2000/liter (~$15,000 per gram). At 18.354 MeV per D-He3 fusion and 40% thermal-to-electrical efficiency (generously), one gram of He-3 yields

1/3 * 6.02 * 10^23 * 18.354 * 0.4 * 4.4505 * 10^-20 = 65565

kilowatt hours of electricity. To produce 1 kilowatt hour of electricity, the helium 3 cost alone would be 23 cents. For comparison, the average retail price, delivered for electricity in the US is below 11 cents per kWh. Even if you had a working fusion reactor all ready to turn He-3 to electricity, He-3 would need to be an order of magnitude cheaper to have a prayer of He-3 fusion competing economically against other electricity sources. And if He-3 is an order of magnitude cheaper that makes it correspondingly harder to turn a profit mining the Moon for it.

Helium 3 lunar mining is not an investment opportunity. It's the end product of motivated reasoning, where the motivation is "I want humans to be doing more things in space."

There's a fundamental reason why lunar He3 isn't worth mining: if you can get net power from D-He3, you can also get net power from the easier D-D reaction, and the output of that reaction is half He3 and half tritium. If your D-D reactor is profitable then the He3 is effectively free.

Ycombinator-funded fusion startup Helion is working on a hybrid D-D/D-He3 reactor, and says the combined reaction would release only 6% of its energy as neutron radiation (compared to 80% with D-T).

sure there is plenty of money in tourism

Consider just the launch cost of an Apollo type mission. S-IVB is 110 Mg, the Command/Service module was 30 Mg, and the lunar module was 16 Mg. That gives us about 150 metric tonnes as a reasonable estimate of the payload to LEO needed for a lunar trip.

Right now, you're looking at about $340M (at $2200/kg) on two falcon heavies to boost that.

If we handwave R&D and engineering costs, you're still looking at around $170M per person on the moon.

Of the not-so-many people who can afford that, how many people do you think will actually do so?

They [0] ?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World%27s_Billionaires

I always thought that a good way to spawn a space race would be to let the first human representative of a country who successfully lands there and plants a flag gets the planet.

As a species, we should agree to these terms, because expansion of our species is more important than anything.

Getting the planet/continent/island is easy. Keeping it from all the other humans who come planting their own flags...now that's the hard part, where the weapons come in.

I'd repudiate the Outer Space Treaty wholesale. Of course, the New York Times would never mention that as a possibility.

The article explicitly mentions the possibility: "Officials at Moon Express and Planetary Resources say they do not want unfettered freedom in space, nor do they seek withdrawal from the Outer Space Treaty."

Or make your money in Latvia, which is not a party or a signatory ;)

Could we not build some kind of massive solar farm on the moon? Then beam down all that power to earth.

(Just thinking out loud here)

It's a lot cheaper to build huge solar farms in deserts. Probably a couple of orders of magnitude cheaper.

That depends on how cheap space flight is in the future, in the past (say 1800) the thought that it would be substantially cheaper to manufacture something in China and ship it across the pacific ocean than it would be to manufacture it locally was not only laughable but utterly insane.

That depends on how cheap space flight is in the future

Your argument works better to support the statement, "That depends on how cheap space manufacturing is in the future." We can fairly easily procure massive amounts of aluminum and silicon on the Moon. If we can invent industrial processes and perfect tele-operation, then we could create massive solar farms on the Moon. However, it might be even better to launch the material from the lunar surface with electromagnetic drivers and construct the solar farms in orbits, where they would receive sunlight 100% of the time.

Japan's space agency has already conducted tele-operation tests in conditions of massive lag. It turns out that highly motivated people can tele-operate manipulators even with 1 second of lag. This puts the Moon within reach of such tele-operation.

One major problem is its mode of failure. It turns our power plant into a gigantic death ray.

I remember reading about this concept (geez!) 20 years ago, though the sources were not as far as the moon [1]. I believe Isaac Asimov ranked civilizations based on the proportion of energy gathered from its main star.

[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/s/400104/beam-it-down/

You may be thinking of the Kardashev scale: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale

we don't have the technology to 'beam all that power to earth' - whatever that might even mean. Furthermore, 384.000km is quite the distance.

That shouldn't be notably more efficient.

Sure, solar panels operate at a significantly higher efficiency on the moon due to no atmosphere to diffuse the sun's energy... but then you have to pay the atmosphere cost to get it to Earth.

Your suggestion presupposes that we can transfer energy through the atmosphere more efficiently than the energy of the sun is transferred through it.

We certainly could do so if we had a space elevator (but at that point just put the solar panels in geostationary orbit with the elevator, not on the moon).

Not yet. Wait for few more years and we will get our answer!

You've surely meant He3?

there is a dispictable me joke in here some where, the villain in that movie tries to make a great deal of money from the moon.

Say goodbye to Diets and feel slim again eating all that you want at the same time!. Yup, I $€€ potential here.

Or maybe we could eliminate enough matter from the moon to make tides less strong and compensate the effect of the climatic change.

If we mess with the tides, climate change will be the least of our worries, we'd be facing total ecosystem collapse. Many species have life cycles that are very closely tied to the effects of the tides, messing with the strengths of those effects could be catastrophic to life on the planet.

Then if we colonise and make massive cities in the moon or if we mine extensively the moon for minerals and move them to the earth, aren't we changing (slightly) the mass of the moon?

This lead to an interesting question. If we keep adding or removing enough stuff for enough time, at some point we could trigger artificially an effect on tides. We should have a wide safety limit (taking in mind than the moon mass is much bigger than lunokjod2 mass for example, and also any asteroid is also much more massive than human stuff left in the moon), but there is a limit in theory. This could change at long term if we colonise seriously the moon. I wonder if somebody has calculated this coeficient yet. If not, you can call it the "loony valdes" limit, XD XD ;-).

About if anyone can make money on the moon, I bet that just recovering lunokjod-2 and bringing it to the earth (or fixing it, if still functional) should provide some money for the rescuers. Is the biggest known concentration of rich metals in a small spot of the moon surface and also the easiest to find and mine. This stuff must be expensive.

I haven't looked at the article but I'm confident there is no profit to be made going to the moon.

we're glad you're confident but let's agree your comment isn't bringing much value to the convo

Okay lets see what the article actually says... "The moon, peppered with the impacts of asteroids over the eons, should also possess dollops of platinum and other precious metals. Helium-3, embedded in the lunar crust by the solar wind, could be fuel for future fusion power plants."

Unconfirmed dollops of precious metals (no mention of how to extract this) and fuel for a type of reactor that does not exist. All this at the most inaccessible place humans have ever been! Sounds lucrative.

There is all sorts of money to be made on the moon. You can be a moon welder, you can lead EVAs for groups of tourists, you can even be a smuggler and sneak in Cuban cigars to the moons upper class.

I haven't looked at the article but ... tourism?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

> "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."

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