Mining water, metals, and oxygen from the Moon and asteroids seems promising, but only if these space-based resources are reasonably accessible.
In the next decade, NASA and its collaborators are turning their gaze back to the Moon. The agency is looking to land astronauts there in 2025 as part of the ongoing Artemis program; this would be the first time an astronaut has landed on the Moon since the final Apollo mission in 1972.This new era of exploration is also ushering in a new era of human presence and economics in space, one that may be fueled by mining for resources instead of launching them from Earth aboard rockets.
“ISRU could mean mining something and bringing it back to Earth,” Ben Bussey, chief scientist at commercial lunar lander provider Intutive Machines, told Gizmodo during a phone chat. “But it could also mean things like building infrastructure that then makes it easier to do things on the Moon.”Astronauts could also take ISRU one step further and strip metal out of the lunar soil to build infrastructure like habitats or launch equipment.
, for example. In those cases, NASA had developed some sort of engineering framework or jumping off point for space companies to follow, but ISRU is, and Sanders says that the private space industry needs to determine if mining on the Moon is even logistically possible before companies jump on board.“Public-private partnerships and commercial involvement is becoming more and more important to succeeding and implementing [NASA’s] objectives,” Sanders said.
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