MOON MINING: A LUNATIC OR LUNAR GOLD RUSH?
“Why the moon?” asked President Kennedy at Rice University. A new answer has emerged this week, with China’s Chang’e 5 spacecraft landing to collect soil and rocks.
It’s been nearly half a century since the last lunar samples were retrieved and brought back to earth. But those 382 kilograms of collected materials (1969–72, mostly by Apollo program) did not arouse much interest in the resources of the Moon. Possibly, the 1979 Moon Treaty, stipulating that nations will not mine resources in outer space, made the legal status of mining space resources unclear and controversial. The use of Moon resources was part of Newt Gingrich’s 2012 presidential campaign, and didn’t recruit many supporters. Nevertheless, earlier this year, President Trump signed an Executive Order to encourage US companies to mine the Moon for resources.
The Moon contains many valuable resources, based on geological surveys. One particular resource has ignited the imagination of many: helium-3, which is a rare helium isotope that could be used for innovations in nuclear fusion. The Chinese Lunar Exploration Program (CLEP) that launched Chang’e 5 is specifically looking for the isotope helium-3 for use as an energy source on Earth. The Geochemist Ouyang Ziyuan who’s heading CLEP, aims high: “each year, three space shuttle missions could bring enough (helium-3) fuel for all human beings across the world.” Not everyone is in agreement that helium-3 will produce a safe fusion solution. In an article entitled “Fears over Factoids”, the physicist Frank Close described the concept as “Moonshine”.
The Moon also contains rare earth elements, which are vital in emerging and existing technologies, from smartphones and computers to medical equipment. NASA views mining of rare-earth minerals as a viable lunar resource, although current evidence suggests rare-earth elements are less abundant on the moon than on earth.
This fall, NASA has announced it is looking for private companies to go to the moon and collect dust and rocks from the surface to bring them back to Earth. The American space agency would then buy the moon samples. The importance of NASA’s announcement is not the (relatively negligible) financial incentive, but in establishing the legal precedent that private companies can collect and sell lunar materials.
NASA has picked 11 Space Companies to help put American boots on the lunar ground. The agency splits a total of $45.5 million worth of contracts “to conduct studies and produce prototypes of human landers for its Artemis lunar exploration program. Among the companies supporting NASA under its Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) contract are private companies such as Orbit Beyond, Deep Space Systems, Firefly Aerospace, Intuitive Machines, Masten Space Systems, Moon Express, Elon Musk’s SpaceX, Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin, Astrobotic, and Ceres Robotics.
These privately-held companies have not filed yet for IPO, but there is a recent craze of companies in the space sector: Shares of Stable Road Acquisition Corporation (SRAC) popped as much as 46.5% in the last 10 days. The special-purpose acquisition company is engineering a reverse-merger IPO to make the space transportation specialist Momentus a publicly traded entity next year (under the ticker symbol MNTS) through a deal that values the company at $1.2 billion. Virgin Galactic (SPCE), the first pure-play “space company”, has climbed 65% since the beginning of November.
Can we, as individuals, buy a ticket to the Moon? One small step for man would be buying shares of companies that aim at tapping into this gold mine. For this purpose, we are creating a ‘Moonshot List’ : a space sector follow-up. This blog will present a selective weekly deep dive of a subset of the companies mentioned above, and more. Follow this blog and we will fly you to the Moon.
