Apparently, it’s first come, first served for the riches of the moon, so former-Microsoft and currently very rich dude Naveen Jain is going to figure out to get up there and start digging:
NASA, which ended America’s space shuttle program in June, says it wants to privatize spaceflight. Naveen Jain, co-founder and chairman of Moon Express, Inc., wants to go a step further: He wants to privatize the moon itself.
Jain’s company plans to piggyback on private shuttle flights, using them to carry his lunar landers and mining platforms to the moon.
“People ask, why do we want to go back to the moon? Isn’t it just barren soil?” Jain told FoxNews.com. “But the moon has never been explored from an entrepreneurial perspective.”
Our nearest neighbor in the sky holds a ransom in precious minerals, Jain explained: Twenty times more titanium and platinum than anywhere on earth, not to mention helium 3, a rare isotope of helium that many feel could be the future of energy on Earth and in space.
When the word “ransom” comes up, that doesn’t exactly give me a good feeling about this project.
This article appears in Oct 13-19, 2011.
How about harpooning it and towing it home? lol.
Well, it sounds kind of bad to me, too….but just to be ornery, let’s look at it from a practical perspective. How is it different from how mankind has mined and otherwise “developed” this planet’s resources as part of who and what we have become? Of course, perhaps some of us don’t like what we have become, so where should we have stopped using natural resources to improve our lot? When we were still finger-dragging cave dwellers, or maybe in the middle ages when even the so-called civilized world was wracked with poverty and pestilence and where the “99%” were worse off than today? Where we find ourselves now is the result of progress, and isn’t that what Progressives are all about? (Said with tongue firmly in cheek). The only alternatives I can think of are either to leave the moon untouched, or to have government exploit it, begging the question, “which government?”
Like all mining, this will disrupt or destroy the moon’s delicate natural ecosystem.
This will end in lithobraking.
Eco System? The moon has no ecosystem… Idiot..