Hacker News Reader

What's much more valuable than the gold is the infrastructure required to bring that gold back to earth.

Harvesting sand and helium from space might be more valuable than gold.

The sand comment had me perplexed, until I did some googling:

https://www.npr.org/2017/07/21/538472671/world-faces-global-...

A lot of Dutch companies get their sand from the bottom of the sea, though. Plenty of sand there.

Apparently desert sand is no good for making concrete, because it's been smoothed and rounded by the wind. I'm guessing moon sand wouldn't have such a problem. Although you'd have to solve the problem of re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere. How practical are space elevators?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com