This article claims that enough asteroids have struck the moon over time that inevitably there are enough deposits of valuable metals to make mining the Moon worthwhile:
“There might be more than $1 trillion worth of platinum deposits on the moon, according to a paper published in the journal Planetary and Space Science. Of the 1.3 million craters on the moon with a diameter greater than one kilometer, “nearly 6,500 were made by asteroids containing commercial quantities of platinum,” said New Scientist. This “highlights the potential viability and profitability of lunar mining endeavors compared to mining asteroids in orbit,” said the paper.”
This kind of jibes with my recent post where I said a Moon base is a more realistic goal than a manned trip to Mars. And Now I see why.
My future will be as a uranium miner on the Moon. I will start out with uranium and then branch out into gold and platinum. Eventually I may be able to concentrate completely on tantalum, my favorite metal.
But seriously, I think there is a lot more likelihood of the Moon becoming economically useful to humans than Mars. The difference in distance alone makes Mars almost impossibly difficult for manned flights.
The Moon on the other hand was reached more than fifty five years ago by men whose technological capabilities were rudimentary compared to what we have at our disposal today. Imagine what improvements modern computing power and automation could do to make reaching and working on the Moon safer and easier.
But most important we must go to the Moon because Mt Rushmore is too small and crowded for this:
