Why Moon Mining Will DEFINITELY Be A Thing | Answers With Joe

this video is brought to you by curiosity stream and nebula hey did you hear that they're stacking artemis one this thing's actually starting to happen some pictures were released about a month ago of the sls being stacked in the vab at cape canaveral and this is really exciting look for all the valid criticisms of the space launch system this will be the most powerful rocket ever built it's gonna be 15 more powerful than the saturn v and yes starship will have more thrust when it comes online i'll let you guys argue in the comments whether or not it's going to come online first so also i thought it was pretty cool when they said that this is the first deep space rocket that was assembled in the vab since the apollo missions right now they're targeting a november launch that's probably optimistic but you know their all the pieces have been in the vab i want to say since march they're assembling it this is starting to get real the purpose of the artemis program is of course to take us back to the moon but this time to stay permanently in a moon base that would use some of the stuff that we've learned over the last 20 years in the iss in fact you can kind of think of it as the iss on the moon uh in the early stages anyway but i have a theory um you could call it the wu-tang cash rules everything around me theory which is basically that in order for a permanent presence on the moon to really be sustainable and successful something has to pay for that the public support for space travel is fickle to say the least i mean just a few years after the event that we all now seem to agree was the greatest achievement in human history the public was so disinterested in it that they stopped funding the program i mean seriously the moon landings are just now like shorthand for the ultimate in human achievement right i mean how many times have you heard somebody say you know i don't know how come we can put a man on the moon but we can't make a pin that works the first time or how come we can put a man on the moon but we can't make a restaurant table that doesn't wobble or oh we can land a man on the moon but i can't get a date we have been using that moment in history as the benchmark against which we measure everything else for 50 years but people in 1972 were like they what what happened oh they're going to the moon again hey here's a thought maybe don't interrupt me while i'm reading unless you're bringing me something interesting glinda put abroad luckily if we are going to the moon to stay there's plenty of resources there that can help pay for it and set up an infrastructure for even more deep space missions here's what that might look like [Music] neil armstrong and buzz aldrin walking around on the moon in 1969 might be what everybody's talking about when they say we landed on the moon but the fact of the matter is we landed on the moon a long time before that kinda in fact it was the russians that first landed on the moon with their luna 2 mission in 1959 a full 10 years earlier of course landed is one way to put it another way might be slammed into it at 7 400 miles an hour but this was the first time that human beings had interacted with a celestial body so i mean you know it counts soft landings are much more impressive and the russians did pull that off with luna 9 in january of 1966. the u.s was just a few months behind with surveyor one in may surveyor missions as the name implies were meant to survey the moon and find places that had the most opportunity for scientific discovery surveyors 1 3 5 6 and 7 all successfully landed and took a total of 87 000 photos of the moon and we learned a lot from these missions actually just the landing itself taught us a lot because before we landed scientists weren't 100 sure just how you know fluffy the moon was there was a real concern that the legs might just sink into the soil you know they didn't know how loose or compact the soil might be for all they knew it might be like quicksand and the last thing you want is for your astronauts to be walking across the lunar surface and get sucked into some kind of quicksand that just pulls them further and further in and then before one of their heads disappears he says i've got something important to tell you and then he never finishes the sentence because they get sucked down into this tunnel that somehow the quicksand didn't fall into the tunnel that makes no sense at all but then whoa jump scare there's a big snake in there but the snake is hurt the snake is hurt so one of the astronauts like uses some kind of magical power that we've never seen before to heal the snake and then to reward them the snake like points them to this knife this knife that has etched into the side of it this design that just perfectly lines up with the place that they want to go to you know if you just happen to be standing in the spot that you need to be standing in for it to line up like okay i'm not over it i'm clearly i'm clearly not over it surveyor of course set the stage for the apollo missions and in fact apollo 12 landed so close to the surveyor three lander that they were actually able to go over and walk up to it and check on it and service it this this was actually the first time and only time that human beings have serviced a rover or a a probe on another celestial body hayes gray art did a cool animation of it you should be checking them out if you haven't already anyway the apollo missions for all their glory left behind a lot of trash like 22 pages of trash a lot of this was for simple weight reasons you know they wanted to preserve as much fuel as they possibly could so they had to make it as lean as possible for example they left the special hasselblad cameras that they took with them to the moon uh on the moon's surface and just took the film back with them now those are probably some expensive cameras but for everything that they dumped they were able to bring back something far more precious moon rock the astronauts took loads of these rock and dust samples home to help answer questions like how old is the moon where and how did the moon originate what history and geological features do the moon and the earth have in common and what are the differences and what can the moon tell us about the rest of the solar system and the rest of the universe 840 pounds of lunar samples were brought back to earth and nasa's still being really conservative about how it's used in fact 85 percent of the samples that have been brought back have not been studied at all they're kind of keeping them clean for the event that there might be some future technologies that they would have clean virgin soil to play with but of the 15 that has been analyzed this is what we found first of all oxygen which is fairly important it's kind of hard to live in a place if you don't have any oxygen denver and one can be forgiven for being surprised by that because oxygen is a gas and as we all know there is no atmosphere on the moon but it is chemically bound as oxides and minerals and glass you have to do some processing to get to it but there's a lot of it there 40 to 45 of the moon's composition is oxygen so one trick that's being worked on at the european space agency is molten salt electrolysis placing the regolith in a metal basket with molten calcium chloride salt to serve as an electrolyte the regolith is heated to 950 degrees celsius at this temperature the regolith remains solid but passing a current through it causes the oxygen to be extracted from the regolith and migrate across the salt to be collected at an anode and this isn't such a crazy idea submarines have been doing this for a long time using candles smarter every day did a whole video about it so this would not only give us air to breathe it's also necessary for space travel because it's used as an oxidizer with rocket fuel and it can be combined with hydrogen to make water they also found silicon which makes up about 20 percent of the regolith and it can obviously be used for semiconductors and solar panels and stuff it's actually chemically bound with some of that oxygen i was just talking about is a silicate ion so yeah mining and processing silicon can be another source of oxygen and it can be made into a type of rocket fuel called silane which is basically the same as methane but instead of a carbon atom there's a silicon atom and then when burned with oxygen you can get water and silica as a result the specific impulse of saline is slightly less than methane and you would probably require more oxygen to get the same amount of weight another benefit is silicon ferro alloys which can be used to make cast iron and steel and silicone metal can be alloyed with aluminum to make certain chemicals like silicones luckily there's a lot of aluminum on the moon as well we obviously know that aluminum is good for certain construction and manufacturing uses but it's got other uses too for example one thing that you won't find on the moon is copper which you would need a lot of for electrical wire and stuff and while aluminum doesn't conduct quite as well as copper does it could be used in a pinch it's also useful for the construction of mirrors for solar collection and reflective materials for spacecraft because it's a really good reflector of both visible and infrared light it also has high thermal connectivity and corrosion resistance which makes it good for heat exchangers the drawback is yes it is a good conductor of heat but it also suffers through a lot of expansion and contraction with heat changes and the heat is going to change quite a bit on the moon there's only a 300 degree difference between night and day there and yeah when aluminum is stressed over and over again it can tend to fail eventually which is why titanium is usually preferred over aluminum but yeah also anybody who's read andy ware's book artemis the city of artemis in the book uses aluminum smelting as a source of oxygen and water and everything so the way he envisions it anyway it could play a very important role in any kind of moon city rare earths can also be found on the moon which isn't as weird as it sounds rare earths actually aren't as rare as the name implies and they're not limited to earth the name is actually sort of a bad translation of the french word terra which was also used in terms of oxides back when this was first discovered they're called rare even though they're abundant on earth because they're not very dense on earth so you have to pull up a lot of ore to get the amount that you need of rare earth which is actually really damaging to the environment but their value is actually going up because they're so used in electronics so it might be quite valuable on the moon someday next up is thorium of course we all love thorium for the potential it has for energy here on earth i've covered this in a previous video but there's a particular spot on the moon that it's got the uh um there's a lot of thorium there it's called the compton belkovitch thorium anomaly and it was found in 1998 by the gamma ray spectrometer instrument onboard the lunar prospector located between the compton and belkovic craters this weird little upswelling has thorium concentrations at 5.3 micrograms per gram now that might not sound like a lot but thorium concentrations on earth are usually at .06 micrograms per gram so this is 88 times more in this one spot on the moon anyway it's thought to be an old magma flow from the early days of the moon due to the presence of other creep elements there and then there's the water now you probably already know that scientists have found frozen water ice in the craters around the poles of the moon that never see any sunlight this is a big deal it cost ten thousand dollars to launch one gallon of water up into space and it's been rumored that humans are sixty percent water so you know finding water on the moon makes it so that we don't have to tap our astronauts for the water and if you're wondering just how much water is in them their craters it's a lot based on remote observations by radar instruments on chandrayon 1 and the lro the lunar poles have over 600 billion kilograms of water ice that's enough to fill at least 240 000 olympic sized swimming pools and that's a low end estimate and water can also be made by getting the hydrogen and oxygen out of the soil with the processing that i was talking about a second ago i mean having access to water on the moon would be a game changer not just for keeping astronauts alive and everything but also for agriculture possible animals up there fuel production water's pretty awesome it's done a good job here on earth anyway but there's one last one that we got to talk about especially if we ever get fusion energy off the ground and that's helium-3 this was actually the conceit of the movie moon starring sam rockwell he worked at a helium-3 mine there is a type of fusion reaction that can be done with helium-3 that's just like regular helium but it has an extra neutron and it's very rare here on earth basically it's created by the radioactive decay of tritium so it's actually kind of rare here but the moon is bombarded with it from the solar wind the sun releases massive amounts of helium-3 in its solar wind but it doesn't really get through the atmosphere to us whereas the moon has been soaking in it for billions of years so yeah if we can finally crack fusion energy helium-3 mining will be big business up there in fact china and russia are already setting the stage with their lunar programs china's rover right now is up there looking around for 3. so you can kind of divide all these up into two camps the in-situ utilization resources and the stuff that we might send back to earth launch costs are going down but it's still super expensive to put stuff up into space going all the way the moon you're looking at like 2.2 million dollars per kilogram so a gallon of milk would be around 6 million dollars so in order to justify the cost of sending these things back to earth they would have to be a huge economic incentive and helium 3 is one of the few things that actually could meet that economic incentive right now because it's so rare one gram of helium-3 is worth fourteen hundred dollars it'd be 1.4 billion dollars per metric ton and from what we can tell there's 1.1 million metric tons and the surface around the moon down to the depth of a couple of meters that's roughly 1.54 quadrillion dollars worth we think somebody's going to find a way to get to that if that is we can crack fusion energy cue the jokes in the comments and where there are valuable resources there are going to be countries trying to control them and that's why the artemis accords were created the artemis accords are an attempt to create a framework around the exploitation of resources on the moon because apparently that's where we are in human history now as of june 2021 12 countries have embraced artemis accords including australia brazil canada italy japan luxembourg new zealand the republic of korea ukraine the united arab emirates the united kingdom and the united states and the core principles include peaceful purposes transparency interoperability emergency assistance registration of space objects release of scientific data preserving outer space heritage space resources deconfliction of space activities and orbital debris given that we're talking about mining the moon right now the space resources bullet does stand out and it can be summarized like this the ability to extract and utilize resources on the moon mars and asteroids will be critical to support safe and sustainable space exploration and development the artemis accords reinforce that space resource extraction and utilization can and will be conducted under the auspices of the outer space treaty with specific emphasis on articles 2 6 and 11. the outer space treaty was signed in 1967 and i'll avoid going down a whole rabbit hole on that might be worth its own video but it's basic just as to get people to play nice and be peaceful and and cooperative in space it's governed by the united nations committee on the peaceful uses of outer space who oversee several other space treaties over the years but the artemis accords are focused on the moon and kind of tie up all the other treaties in one package now how all this plays out when money starts moving around is another matter but stepping way back maybe a good question to ask is why are we doing this in the first place you know some would make the argument that we've ruined earth so now we're going to go ruin the moon too big win and i have my concerns over that as well but there are some major advantages to doing this first of all the moon is going to become a fueling station for other deep space missions especially to mars now that we can you know create fuel from the regolith there plus no atmosphere in 1 6 gravity means it's a lot cheaper to launch interplanetary missions from the moon than from earth not to mention that the moon is moving around the earth at 2 288 miles an hour so that's a lot of just free momentum you can use to just slingshot things into the solar system it's kind of like earth's trebuchet mining the moon of course is a lot more difficult than just dropping a few bulldozers down to the surface aside from problems like deep space radiation and micro meteorites you also have the problem of moon dust yeah the very thing we're going there to mine moon dust is kind of horrifying it's like the glitter that you can't get off of yourself except it's designed in hell moon dust is very very small but it's also very very jagged it'll damage your lungs if it gets into your lungs so it makes it hard to breathe and it can corrode and and tear down little structures in any kind of machine or anything like that the way we mine on the moon is gonna have to be totally different from how we mine on earth i mean imagine dropping a massive pile of regolith down on a planet that has only 15 percent of the earth's gravity and that's happening everywhere there's a real danger of getting so much fine dust floating around the surface of the moon that created a an atmosphere of tiny microscopic daggers that could just eat everything apart and make it uninhabitable this is the reason spacex moved their descent engines to the top of the starship lander so that it blows around as little dust as possible it's a massive engineering challenge that many companies are working on figuring out right now um obviously we're in the early stages and right now we're just gonna have to figure out how to live there but i do feel like it's kind of inevitable having said that we have to be wary that it's done responsibly and that it's supplemental to scientific research there's still a lot we can learn from the moon yeah i mean keep in mind there is no erosion on the moon whatsoever so there's still the possibility of asteroid impacts that hit the earth and then flung things out to the moon and it's still in pristine condition up there there is a non-zero percent chance that there's a t-rex tooth that got blasted off the face of the earth 64 million years ago on the moon right now there's also a record of the sun's radioactivity etched into certain moon rocks which we could learn a lot from i mean we don't want to mess up the moon too much it's the moon the moon has been inspiring humanity for thousands of generations it's only recently we discovered that it's got some practical value up there let's just hope we don't forget the inspirational value as well who knows you may be one of the last generations to see the moon in its pristine condition so get outside and enjoy it while you can if you want to go deeper into the artemis program and the upcoming moon missions and the technology is going to be required for us to live there i can definitely recommend the film return to the moon on curiosity stream here they imagine what moon colonization would look like the technologies that would be required and some of the companies working on those technologies if you enjoy this topic it's a nice deeper dive on the subject curiosity stream of course has thousands of documentary series from some of the best documentary filmmakers from around the world and it was created by the guys behind the discovery channel so it's kind of like what the discovery channel was meant to be it'll suck you in just get ready to binge on some nerd stuff even better with your subscription to curiosity stream you get free access to nebula the streaming service i'm a part of as well as many of your favorite youtube channels like isaac arthur who's gone way deeper on moon mining and planetary exploration than pretty much anybody you can see all our videos ad free and you get access to nebula originals that you can't see anywhere else including my original series mysteries of the human body this is a series where we take a look at the human body and all the weird stuff that goes on inside of it we're currently four episodes in with still a couple more to come so you can go check it out right now and get caught up and then be the first to see the new ones and you can get this bundle for 26 off of an annual subscription which means it's 14.79 for the whole year for two streaming services that is ridiculous so yeah if you're curious just go over to curiositystream.com joe scott to get started it's seriously the best streaming deal on the planet and i personally use and enjoy both services so i highly recommend them uh yeah just go to curiositystream.com check it out all right big thanks to curiosity stream for supporting this video and a big shout out to the answer files on patreon uh who are supporting this channel forming an awesome community being really great peeps uh i got some new people i got to call out their names real quick let's murder them we got some stiggles dr gibberish theresa the awesome tyson lothric jesper deyong shitty bill shitty bots neom kehoe danny edwards daniel blankstein welcome back daniel josh han juan cristancho gabriel's milk and river johnson thank you guys so much if you'd like to join them get early access to videos exclusive live streams and all kinds of just cool stuff and just you know perform an awesome community uh you can go to patreon.com please do like and share this video if you liked it and if this is your first time here and google thinks you'll like this one so why not click it just click on that thing just click just make a click just take a look there you go you'll like it uh there's also all these others down here they got my face on them on the thumbnails and if you enjoy them i invite you to subscribe we'll come back to videos every monday cool cool that's it for now thanks for watching you guys go out there have an eye opening rest of the week and i'll see you on monday i got choked up i got choked at the end leave that in nick love you guys take care

Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 773,727

Keywords: answers with joe, joe scott

Id: jbhck-i1EpA

Length: 19min 9sec (1149 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 02 2021