The Moon Offers Strategic Resources

An important debate going on in the United States right now is whether the country should consider the Moon as being a source of strategic materials, such as for example rare-Earth metals (REM).

These are chemical elements that are very hard to come by in nature, hence the name. At this point, China controls this market, controlling about 90 percent of all REM exports around the globe.

Given that these chemicals are being used to produce a wide variety of equipment, including headphones, cell phones and circuit boards, it stands to reason that all countries need to ensure their own supplies.

But China announced several times over the past few years that it will only sell excess REM to other countries, given that its own industry is growing very fast.

As such, countries in which the elements are very rare are left to fend for themselves. As one of those countries, the US is currently analyzing the possibility of using the Moon as a quarry for REM.

There are many who oppose the idea, and some who accept it, but the truth is that there are incredible challenges associated with bringing back the precious stuff in an economic manner and at large scale.

Experts say that the sheer complexity of establishing such an infrastructure, as well as the costs associated with this, would be enough to send any country straight into bankruptcy, unless innovative methods of doing so are not found.

Just imagine the things you would need for harvesting minerals from the Moon – a spacecraft capable of carrying the stuff, a lunar outpost and drilling machine, and shuttle spacecraft to travel back and forth, and an unloading dock here on Earth.

Costs associated with existing technologies make such a plan unfeasible, many argue. But, besides this valid truth, the fact is that the Moon contains vast amounts of some very precious goods.

At this point, agencies in the US are advising the government for creating state-run stockpiles of the stuff, given that the conclusions of a recent report from the Congressional Research Service find the situation to be alarming.

The document shows that a real threat exists on the current supply chain, and advises that measures to fix the situation are required from authorities.

“Yes, we know there are local concentrations of REE on the Moon,” says Brown University Department of Geological Sciences planetary scientist Carle Pieters, quoted by Space.

“We also know from the returned samples that we have not sampled these REE concentrations directly, but can readily detect them along a mixing line with many of the samples we do have,” the expert goes on to say.