Subject: Re: [Utah-astronomy] Chinese Moon landing this morning. Bruce Hugo wrote: Yup...these moon shots are for mineral?prospecting.? Its only time?before China begins to claim?areas on the?moon as their property.
Before we start worrying about the Chinese mining the Moon, let's remember what it takes to bring back even a small number of kilograms of rock. 400 (about what the Apollo astronauts brought back) is nothing compared to what a commercial mining interest would want, and that says nothing about getting it down to the surface of the Earth. The more mass, the larger the heat shield needed to slow something down to parachute speeds, and then, of course, you must consider the ridiculous size of parachute needed. No, we have to wait until some incredibly revolutionary form of propulsion is discovered before we can start making the Moon look like Appalachia or Bingham Canyon (I say discovered, because it's a much bigger problem than just modifying/developing something based on existing technologies). Of course, if you recover the metals and make the widgets off the Earth, that's another story, but because of the the same problems of currently unknown energy sources that would be needed, it's still all SciFi. John R. Peterson