The six Apollo missions that landed on the moon brought back a total of 382 kilograms of lunar surface material.

That’s 842 pounds.

There’s a mine in Chile called Escondida. It’s the largest copper mine in the world. It routinely produces more than a 1000 kilotonnes of copper annually.

That’s so many pounds it may not be worth calculating! Fortunately we have Wolfram Alpha and it says 2.2 x 10⁹ pounds.

That’s 2.2 billion (2,200,000,000) pounds!

Here’s a quote from CEO Sherry Duhe (Newcrest) about our need for mines:

The mining industry needs to bring online the equivalent of 17 more Escondidas, the world’s biggest copper mine, by 2050, to meet demand projections, she said as an example of the scale of the problem.

That’s true in general, even if hyperbolic, as we will certainly need lots of copper and other minerals. In response to the problem we get stuff from NASA saying we will be mining the moon in ten years.

That’s a bit fanciful for me. 842 pounds isn’t a lot of rock! Imagine the number of rocket launches it will take to establish even the tiniest of a semi-permanent habitable human “presence” on the moon let alone some kind of industrial infrastructure. We’ve got better rocket technology today but it is just an improvement over the same rockets that were launched in Apollo’s day. The physics hasn’t changed. There are no fundamental breakthroughs in the industry. And space is still utterly hostile to human life.

No, I think we’ll have to get that stuff right here on earth and in our own back yards.

p.s. Check out this NASA/JPL website “The Lunar Gold Rush” and the infographic supplied there by 911metallurgist if you want to get a sense of how speculative the entire moon-mining venture is.