[SpaceProgram] NASA Lunabotics Mining Competition

[Matt Joyce]

Well mining lunar poles for ice (H20) would be a necessity to build a
refueling station on the moon.  Which would be a necessity for a permanent
presence there.

Also launching materials we can gather / process / fabricate on the moon
would be cheaper than launching from earth by a sizable amount.

=/

On Mon, Jan 9, 2012 at 9:37 AM, cole santos <cksantos85 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Ya mining the moon is pointless until way later down the tech tree.
> Aluminum, He3, oxygen. The mining strategies are way different as
> well. One has gravity one doesn't. Mining on moon will have lots of
> dust as well that is hell on anything that moves. If I was an
> astronaut I would use a shovel for the quantities required for small
> scale stuff like oxygen for habitats. Rather than surface mining we
> need a tunneler. This would allow us to mine and build habitat at the
> same time. Fusing the walls with a ring of CO2 lasers as you go. If
> you did this on mars on a slope you could build a couple mile deep
> hole. It would be easier to maintain 1 atm at the bottom. Kinda like a
> mine shaft that's hot and pressurized at the bottom.
>
> On Mon, Jan 9, 2012 at 2:04 AM, Alex Cureton-Griffiths <alexcg at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> http://www.nasa.gov/offices/education/centers/kennedy/technology/lunabotics.html
> >
> > Since we've been talking of asteroid mining and potential habitats (of
> > which resource accumulation is a part), I think this could be a really
> > interesting challenge to go for. Not sure there's enough time before
> > the 2012 deadline, but 2013 application process opens in August 2012.
> > It's aimed at university students, so perhaps a hackerspace in
> > Academia could have a stab at it.
> >
> > I'm not an advocate of mining the moon per se, but any mining robot
> > that can mine the moon can likely mine Mars, asteroids, etc.
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