HN Gopher Feed (2017-11-26) - page 1 of 10 ___________________________________________________________________
Can anyone make money on the moon?
43 points by jaredwiener
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/26/science/moon-express-outer-sp...-outer-space-treaty.html?hp=___________________________________________________________________
lajolla - 1 hours ago
sure there is plenty of money in tourism
kilroy123 - 30 minutes ago
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)
olegkikin - 28 minutes ago
It's a lot cheaper to build huge solar farms in deserts. Probably
a couple of orders of magnitude cheaper.
Tade0 - 22 minutes ago
One major problem is its mode of failure. It turns our power
plant into a gigantic death ray.
ezequiel-garzon - 17 minutes ago
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/
flohrian - 17 minutes ago
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.
TheDong - 17 minutes ago
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).
andrewfromx - 25 minutes ago
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.
cousin_it - 25 minutes ago
Surely the easiest way to make money on the Moon is by threatening
kinetic bombardment of Earth?
tehsauce - 1 hours ago
I haven't looked at the article but I'm confident there is no
profit to be made going to the moon.
quickthrower2 - 33 minutes ago
I haven't looked at the article but ... tourism?
mythas - 1 hours ago
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.
yohann305 - 1 hours ago
we're glad you're confident but let's agree your comment isn't
bringing much value to the convo
tehsauce - 52 minutes ago
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.
glenstein - 52 minutes ago
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.
BuildTheRobots - 44 minutes ago
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...
basicplus2 - 1 hours ago
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
zitterbewegung - 1 hours ago
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).
lowpro - 57 minutes ago
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...
philipkglass - 27 minutes ago
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 produce1/3 * 6.02 * 10^23 * 18.354 *
4.4505 * 10^-20 = 163913 kWhof primary (thermal) energy. If
world primary energy demand is 18 terawatts, that's18 * 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.
semi-extrinsic - 1 hours ago
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.
mc32 - 57 minutes ago
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.
dTal - 1 hours ago
Required reading: www.thespacereview.com/article/2834/1tl: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.
ProblemFactory - 57 minutes ago
> 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.
philipkglass - 45 minutes ago
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 yields1/3 * 6.02 * 10^23 * 18.354
* 0.4 * 4.4505 * 10^-20 = 65565kilowatt 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."
DennisP - 35 minutes ago
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).
dbcooper - 43 minutes ago
There?s no carbon on the moon. Unless you can harvest large numbers
of comets, habitation at scale is impossible.
Waterluvian - 25 minutes ago
Stupid question. Is carbon only mandatory if you want long term
sustainable agriculture? Or is it necessary for something else?
olegkikin - 23 minutes ago
Expensive, not impossible.
dwaltrip - 10 minutes ago
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...
partycoder - 35 minutes ago
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.