Airbus to help build Mexican Moon-mining automata Airbus and the Mexican Space Agency (MSA) have agreed to collaborate on tech to extract resources on the Moon. The aerospace company will work with MSA and a startup called Dereum Labs to develop "an end-to-end process from regolith identification and capture to extraction of resources". The three plan to create a "ground …
... can be extracted profitably?
Serious question. In order to profit, one must have a market. Not much market on the moon, and will not be for a long, long time. If ever. As for shipping bits of moon down to Earth for sale, what up there is worth so much more than what we have here on Earth to justify the cost of shipping?
Makes zero sense.
Well I don't know about bringing resources back, but there may well be a business in transporting Underpants Gnomes to the moon...
1: Get to moon
2: Get moon
3:?
4: PROFIT!!!
Although, as the costs fall, there will be a short window of time where the price of 'Moonrock' here will justify the cost of going and getting it...
Depends on your definition of "profit".
If you have a base on the moon any resources that can be sourced from the moon rather than dragged up from Earth is a plus on the profit/loss account.
This is what it's about, resources to keep moon base occupants alive as well as fuel for rockets either back to Earth or out to Mars.
> If you have a base on the moon
That's a big "if" there... While we've been daydreaming about those for half a century now, AFAIK autumn 2021 there is no real money put aside to build one anytime soon, so how can you sell a business plan based on that money?
It's a bit of a chicken/egg situation.
Without exploitable resources available on the moon a moon base is not viable - shipping water & food up from the Earth would be unsustainable so the first step must be to develop systems to exploit the available resources.
Only then will a moon base be possible.
There are some reasonably new (discovered within the last decade) steel making processes that produce oxygen as a by product.
Given the Moon has a similar geological makeup to the Earth, being able to produce both steel and oxygen at the same time would provide more than enough incentive to setup shop up there. Producing new space ships on the Moon, for example, with its much lower gravity makes much more sense than building them on Earth.
> Makes zero sense.
You beat me to it. Indeed, it only makes sense if there are budgets for Moon bases to tap into, and while there is talk about building some one day, none are yet seriously planned.
The whole project smells funny. Ad driven? To pay something as expensive as sending stuff to the Moon? Who are they kidding? Where will those billion-making ads appear anyway?
The amount of wishful/magical thinking and the total lack of technical specifications seem to indicate it's marketing-driven (the most likely explanations are money laundering or bait & switch).
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