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Comment by goku12 | Hacker News Reader

What do you mine on the Moon? Moon's gravity may be 1/6th that of Earth's - but that is still a lot to overcome to bring back anything substantial. I keep hearing about Helium3 fusion. But we don't have any commercially viable fusion reactors around. There may be water - but it's likely going to take a lot of processing to extract. What else is there that we can't get on this planet and is worth the cost of lifting from the Moon?

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https://www.popsci.com/elements-mine-on-the-moon/

This article doesn't address the nuances - the energy requirements, processing of the ore, etc.

So nothing of immediate or direct use here on earth, just things that may be usable for further off-world construction or (in the case of He-3) might be an energy source someday.

isn't metal in orbit much more valuable than metal on earth? i.e. you can build plenty cheap satellites with it.

This assumes you can refine the ores "in orbit" and manufacture everything "in orbit". This in turn requires a ton of manufacturing on Earth and a lot of launches to move all this stuff off Earth. Not to mention all the supporting industry and infrastructure manufacturing normally has on Earth. Not to mention the R&D costs and staff logistics.

This isn't a video game. You can't just click a button and have an autonomous satellite factory churning out satellites in space. Moving any amount of manufacturing or refining into space is a massive logistics undertaking we haven't even begun to explore. Just because Bezos has a vision of moving the working class off Earth or Musk made some off-the-cuff remarks to rile up his yes-men, that doesn't mean this is something that will happen soon, much less something that will be useful soon.

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