Author: Martina Elia Vitoloni | DCL Candidate Air and Space Law, McGill University
Celestial bodies like the moon contain valuable resources, such as lunar regolith — also known as moon dust — and helium-3. These resources could serve a range of applications, including making rocket propellant and generating energy to sustaining long missions, bringing benefits in space and on Earth.
The first objective on this journey is being able to collect lunar regolith. One company taking up this challenge is ispace, a Japanese space exploration company ispace that signed a contract with NASA in 2020 for the collection and transfer of ownership of lunar regolith.
The company recently attempted to land its RESILIENCE lunar lander, but the mission was ultimately unsuccessful. Still, this endeavour marked a significant move toward the commercialization of space resources.
These circumstances give rise to a fundamental question: what are the legal rules governing the exploitation of space resources? The answer is both simple and complex, as there is a mix of international agreements and evolving regulations to consider.
The article has a breakdown of the laws and further context
What exactly are they going to mine? I’n “A City On Mars” (Kelly and ZACH Weinersmith) they claim “one estimate suggests it takes 150 tons of regoluth to produce a single gram of helium-3”. How is that useful?
There are lots of claims online about how abundant Helium-3 is on the moon but they all gloss over the specifics.
It’s not. He-3 is supposed to be maybe one day used in fusion power, but we’re talking about tons of this stuff. Not only scale is off, also He-3 burning requires much higher temperature than D-T fusion, and this is just around in next 20 years pinky promise
People who think that it’s a big deal also take Ray Kurzweil seriously, it’s scifi noise
In practical terms, when DHS wanted to get He-3 neutron sensors, they bought out entire global supply for multiple years, for an application where only grams are needed and it’s not used up. It’s made from decay of tritium currently and it’d be less energy intensive to make it the usual way
I’m way out of my element, and I don’t feel like doing the math right now, but I think it may be worth considering that helium is very light, I think last time I saw it brought up someone said that 1g of helium is like 5 or 6 liters at standard temperature/pressure. Not a huge quantity by any means, but significantly more than you’d probably imagine picturing a gram of water or whatever. I have no idea what kinds of amounts, pressures, etc. are needed for helium to be used in any of the applications we want it for, but I suspect it’s a lot more than that.
Also as far as mining goes, except for the fact that it’s on the moon, it seems like harvesting regolith is probably a fairly straightforward operation, it’s just moon dust, the stuff that’s covering pretty much the entire surface a few meters deep. Seems like all that’s really needed would be some space bulldozers and dump trucks (though of course I’m sure there’s a whole lot more challenges that I’m not thinking of)
To say nothing about whatever is needed to process the regolith, I wouldn’t even know where to begin with that.
But helium also isn’t the only thing we’d be looking to harvest from regolith. Let’s say it takes us 50 years to harvest enough helium for whatever we need it for (no idea if that estimate is over, under, or about right) over those 50 years we’d also be harvesting all of the iron and silicon and whatever else we need to build out the infrastructure to use the helium.
And of course the cost/benefit analysis can be all over the place depending on if you’re thinking about this as some sort of capitalist profit-seeking venture or if it’s more of a “for the good of all mankind” or “scientific research for its own sake” kind of thing.
Lot of things to consider. I’m not saying that mining the moon necessarily makes sense, I also don’t know if it doesn’t there’s a lot of factors at play.
Iron, aluminium, titanium, oxygen, silicon, phosphorus, potassium, I could go on listing elements at great length. There are plenty of resources out there. Celestial bodies are made of resources. You name it, you can find it out there in various abundances.
Helium-3 is just one of the few things you can find out there that is basically unavailable on Earth. It’s myopic to focus solely on that.
That was just an example - in the book they are positing that most of the things people want to mine on the moon are actually very rare - though there may be a lot across the moon it will nit be easy to mine it because the density is low.
It’s better than carving up the ocean floors or the usual opencast mining here on earth. And it could be an incentive to invest into space technology.
But there will be disadvantages too, which are invisible to us right now. I’m sure of it.
The cost of anything beyond our current small-scale exploratory probing of space has to be astronomical with our current footing. Imagine how much fuel/energy you would need to get industrial mining equipment to the Moon or asteroid belt, extract meaningful amounts of material, pack it up, send it back to Earth orbit, and de-orbit it intact.
Most of these costs are in terms of energy, one of the most plentiful things in space. Also, if we do things right (a huge if, I know), the bigger idea is to bootstrap it by sending enough tools to make the tools you need to extract and refine resources. This doesn’t require a von Neumann machine since we can control them, either directly or remotely. Also, if we are going to extract resources in space, a lot of infrastructure will need to be built first, which is cheaper if we use resources that are already in space. And as the saying goes, the surface of the moon is halfway to anywhere in the solar system.
astronomical
: D
I think what they will do is just toss it back to earth and let most of it burn up on reentry but at least we can get some extra lead on the planet even if it crashes through someone’s roof occasionally.
What do you think will happen if we make the moon lighter?
Um. Let’s say, it’s a good thing for us and earth’s space mechanics and weather that the moon is like it is right now.
Some say the earth would spin faster if the moon wasn’t there at all.
Not sure how big the effect of space mining could be on moon’s mass. To be fair I’m more concerned that someone will use the moon as a giant billboard some day. :)
How could anyone trust those rules would be followed? How could anyone trust any agreements or treaties wouldn’t be abandoned? I don’t see it ever happening. I see a mad scramble. With the conflict and exploitation that will come with it.
We have similar treaties for the sea and for Antarctica a d they are generally followed as no country wants to be the one to break them. Not foolproof by any means and it’s pretty likely a rogue character like Trump would push through without thinking about the consequences.
The rules will be the same as they always are: First Come First Served, and Might Makes Right.
Global rules for extracting space resources
Lolwat?
Rules that apply to all nations, much like we have for Antarctica.
Why do I have to think of “don’t look up”…
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If you compare the total mining efforts of the entirety of human civilization, it will about to a small enough fraction of the moon that it would do less to destabilize the orbit of the moon than energy loss due to tidal forces.
