Value of Space Resources w/ George Sowers #9

Hello, everyone. This is David Goldsmith, and welcome to another amazing, hopefully amazing, Project Moon Hut podcast series program, the age of infinite, where we look to learn from individuals from around the world as we are seeking to establish sustainable life on the moon through the accelerated development of an earth and space based ecosystem. Our desired outcome is to change how we live on earth for all species. Today, we have another amazing guest on the line, George Sowers.

How are you, George? I'm great, David. How are you? Great. Let's George has a few little quick points. You can read his bio online. George just retired from the United Launch Alliance. He is now teaching at Colorado School of Mines. And as, he's a physicist. So he's going to come at this, in an angle that I'm not a physicist, so I hope to learn a lot. So, George, the name of the program that we've decided to title this today is the value of space resources.

So I'm expecting a tremendous amount from you. I hope you're up for it. I'm I'm up for it. Okay. So, you haven't outlined or bullet points or something that we can follow so we can all learn together. What what are they? Okay. So I have 7 bullets. So get ready to write. Yes. I'm pen in hand. 1st bullet. Space resources will spur the 3rd great economic revolution for humankind. The first two being the agricultural revolution and the industrial revolution. Okay. That's a long one. Go ahead.

Alright. Bullet point number 2. Resources contained just within the inner solar system are nearly infinite when compared to resources available on earth. Okay. Got it? Yep. And I'm gonna give you two examples. The power output of the sun is 10 trillion times the power consumption of the world. Second example, just one large metallic asteroid contains enough iron, nickel and platinum group metals to meet current consumption for 1000000 of years. So it's iron, nickel, and what's the third one?

Platinum Group Metals. Platinum, that's what I thought. Okay. Next. 1 of the first economically viable uses of space resources will be liquid oxygen, liquid hydrogen propellants from water. Okay. Next. There's abundant water at the lunar poles in the form of ice. Okay. Mining lunar ice for propellant will be an economic underpinning for future lunar settlement. Alright.

And last but not least, space solar power can supply earth's energy needs for the foreseeable future with almost no negative environmental impact, and is affordable if materials come from the man. Okay. So let's start with the first one. First item on our list is space resources spurring the 3rd great evolution. Revolution. Revolution. Revolution. Tell me about it. What what's here? What do you how did you come up with this? What what should we know? What should I know?

So this is placing space resources in the context of human evolutionary history and economic history. Humans evolved, you know, on the order of a 100000 years ago in Africa, started out as hunter gatherers. And as hunter gatherers, that lifestyle, you know, didn't allow for a lot of luxury. There was not a lot of in in economic terms, you characterize it in in, in terms of energy capture. So if you're a hunter gatherer, you're only Wait.

Wait. Wait. Just I gotta in in, you call you just jumped to energy capture. Right. So is that is that something that's commonly referred to when you're talking about this space? Or is this is this a physics type equation? Or It's a it's a it's an, it's it's obviously based in physics because energy is a physics concept, but it's also a concept in economics. Oh, okay. I never I never had heard that and even in the economics classes I've taken. So that was an interesting jump.

Okay. In terms of energy capture It's a it's a proxy for wealth, if you wanna think about it like that. Okay. The amount of energy that a society can harness, is directly related to the amount of wealth that that that that society can generate. Okay. So hunter gatherers weren't wealthy, in a material sense. And their energy capture was only on the order of 4 or 5000 kilocalories per person per day, you know, which is just a little bit more than you need, you know, to eat.

And they had so they had very little energy left over to create artifacts or, you know, build structures or anything like that. About 10000 years ago, some clever hunter gatherers figured out if they saved some of the seeds they had been gathering and sowed them in in, you know, opportune spots and took care of them that they could, reduce the amount of labor it took them to go gather food.

And, you know, that was sort of the genesis of the agricultural revolution, Took place in the, you know, the Middle Eastern regions of the world. And by those clever means, they were able to increase their energy capture from the 4 to 5000 of hunter gatherers up to 10 to maybe even up to 30,000 kilo calories per person per day.

And what that enabled was tremendous population explosion, the creation of civilizations and empires and all the accoutrements of civilization, things like writing and and, you know, building civil engineering projects. All those sorts of things, were enabled by the economic benefits of the agricultural revolution. Of course there were downsides. There was additional disease and and wars and crowding and overpopulation and all those sorts of things.

But fundamentally, the economic plight of humanity was, was bettered, by almost an order of magnitude. Around 300 years ago was the 2nd great economic revolution and that was when some clever Englishmen figured out how to harness fossil fuels. This is energy that had been, you know, put away in rocks you know for 5 to 600000000 years in, in the form of coal in England at the time.

And, that enabled another quantum leap in energy capture, up to say maybe, you know, in the modern days up to say 250,000, calories per person per day in the Western world. And space resources is the next big revolution which will generate another quantum leap through accessing resources that are unlimited with respect to resources available on earth. Our fossil fuel resources that our modern society is dependent on right now are finite.

They'll run out someday although, you know, peak oil keeps moving away from us in time. Isn't that amazing? It went from peak oil was supposed to be past decade within this period of time and and Shell just completely changed that. Oh, yeah. And, you know, technology, you know, people don't count on technology advancing and so our ability to to find more and extract more, continues to increase. But, nevertheless, it is finite because it's all earth based.

And, it also has unintended consequences, you know, generating things like pollution and and, you know, potentially climate change. So looking ahead to that next that next leap is utilizing the resources of space and bringing those resources within the economic sphere of humankind and that will be the next great economic revolution. That's where we get Mearth. Mearth is, is the first step on the road. It's the first step on the road.

So we're so across the, have you ever thought about, just thinking about this moment, have you ever thought about what would the after space resources, what would be the next one? Well, space is pretty large. No. I know that. I just we've got human. We've got the agriculture. We've got the industrial revolution. What what's after space? I I for a second, I said to myself, what would be next? Well, it's it's it's bringing more and more of space into our economic sphere.

You know, the first step is is Mearth or or cislunar space. The next step is the inner solar system. The next step is the entire solar system. The step after that is other star systems, potentially the entire galaxy. There was a Russian astronomer, last name was Kardashev who came up with a numbering scheme. He said if, you know, for for, you know, advanced civilizations. And if you're a civilization of category 1, you control the resources of your entire planet.

You're able to control the resources of your entire planet. If you're a category 2, you control the resources of your entire solar system. Category 3, you control the resources of the entire galaxy. And Kardashev stopped at 3, but you can imagine, you know, a category 4. Do you know how to spell Kardashev? I'd have to look it up real quick. That's okay. We can Starts with a k. I'm gonna yes. K a r t I s h e v. Kardashev. Kardashev. K a r a kardashev. Shev. Yep. Yep. Okay. Good enough.

Okay. So, anymore? I mean, is there anything you wanna add to the space resources component side? And Well, that was that was kind of the first bullet point. Yeah. That's why I was just making sure. Is there anything else you want to add to that before we go into the resources? That's the that's the big claim. That's the space resources are gonna, you know, create evolutionary revolutionary change, for the human species, for the good of the human species.

And, you know, you can you can start to think about, you know, post scarcity economies or economies that have super abundance of things, almost everything that that people want or need. And, imagine what that would that would be like and, and what that would entail. Okay. So let's get on to the second, the resources within our solar system. Right. So the second bullet is the resources contained just within the inner solar system. And by inner solar system, I mean, everything from Jupiter inward.

It includes the asteroid belt, Mars, Earth, obviously, Venus, Mercury, and and all of the, sort of near Earth objects which are basically asteroids that have been kicked out of their asteroid belt orbit by the gravity of Jupiter and swing down in, into the close proximity of Earth. So the resources contained just within that geographic region are nearly infinite compared to the resources available just on earth.

So so the the term infinite, when you use that, how does your mind get you how do you get your mind around that? It's a it's a it's a single word that you can use to to characterize large magnitude differences. And that's why that's why my 3rd bullet was a couple of examples. And, you know, one of the one of the resources in the inner solar system is the energy produced by the sun.

And, you know, that's a, you know, that's an energy source that that, you know, powers everything that we do on Earth today. Because even the fossil fuels that we use 5 or 600000000 years ago were, you know, ancient plants and trees that absorbed, that energy from the sun and then converted into hydrocarbons and then were buried for 100 of 1000000 of years inside the Earth. So even even our fossil fuels owe their existence to solar energy, ultimately.

But the solar energy that's incident on earth right now is a tiny, tiny fraction of what's actually available, of what's actually being put out by the sun because we can only capture what, you know, the energy from the sun is radiating out in all directions. And we're a tiny little dot in that entire radiation pattern. And so I made the point that, one example is that the power output of the sun is 10 trillion times the power consumption of earth right now.

That just says there's a lot of energy out there to go capture to enable that future economic growth. So so within question going back. Why did why in your thinking is do you use Jupiter, Mars, Venus, Mercury, and the asteroid belt? What would be the reason for not using the rest of our solar system? It's a it's it's an accessibility thing. You know, it's kinda like starting with Mearth or cislunar space. You know, it's it's close.

You can imagine, you know, accessing that space in the fairly near future. And you can imagine accessing the inner solar system on a, you know, maybe slightly more delayed but similar kinda time frame. You know, the outer solar system is, you know, the the the gas giants out there, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, it gets to be tougher and tougher to, access resources out there. But that would be the next step after you, start harnessing the inner solar system.

Now could you, to some degree, say that within Mearth, there is also an infinite number of resources because we're getting the same sun. Sun doesn't change for us. And we can harness we can't we will never be able to harness as much as possible outside of a certain range for us. So we've got Mearth with the moon and all the resources from all the asteroids that have hit, the moon, millions of them as I've been told, and within that space.

So could we say to a large degree that just Mearth itself and Mearth being defined as moon and earth in that in that space of about 200 and 70 290,000 miles including a radius around each one of them. Wouldn't you say that we could have infinite possibilities just there? Yeah. I wouldn't, infinite possibilities, yes. In infinite. The agent the infinite infinite resources Resources. For humankind. Resources, not entirely.

The the, the moon is a source of resources, has there's there are a couple of things that are that are, I think, gonna be very economically important for the moon. And I in in one of the subsequent bullets, you know, we'll talk about, water in the form of ice. The moon is is pretty devoid of, of of metals that are readily, extracted. And the water resources on the moon are probably somewhat limited. We don't really know the extent of it.

You know, there's a pretty wide range in the estimates of the water available on the moon. It's certainly enough to to really get things jump started. And, and then I would include within Mearth, I would. Some other people may not. Many near Earth objects which are just as accessible, as as the moon is in in terms of, you know, the ease of transportation. And, that dramatically increases the amount of resources if you include those.

And and that's what in Project Moon Hunt, we are looking at that sphere. So we've got the asteroids that are within. We've got the moon itself. We've got the sun. And if you were to look, and as you said, it's the ushering in of the age of infinite. It's the first step. Right. Is that if we can harness that, it would change how we live on earth for all species. It would change how we, I would assume, it would change, or give us a tremendous amount of resource compared to what we have today.

That's correct. That's absolutely correct. And then and then it's the the stepping stone to even more resource. So I I don't know if you you cover it, but I do wanna ask you in terms of that Mearth space because you have metal, iron, nickel, platinum. When you look at that sphere of Mearth, what do you what resources are there in abundance that we won't have or we can get a different scale or different opportunities beyond that space range?

Yeah. So so our not you know, our knowledge of, you know, our precise knowledge of what resources are available on the moon is is is limited. You know, we haven't had, you know, prospecting type missions and things of that nature, to map out the resources. We know, you know, we know that there's water on the poles of the Moon and that's, that's huge. That's hugely important because water creates, you know, from water you can make propellant. So now you have the oil.

I I have, And we can go over that bullet point after I just Yeah. We could talk about water after. I just what other items with what I've been told is that meteors, not asteroids, have hit the moon. There are millions that have hit the moon. They're going to be carrying all different types of resources that we some of them might not even know about. And just not even the context of the moon itself. But from those, there's a tremendous amount of value in resources.

Yeah. I think that I think that's true. It's it's not well characterized. And I, you know, that's one of the that, you know, that that prospecting phase is one of the first steps. Is to find out what's really there.

But, you know, the things that we do know about, you know, for example, the samples that have, that were returned by the Apollo astronauts, you know, those are, you know, mostly, you know, silica based rocks, you know, so you can think of, of, you know, construction materials and and, things of that nature, raw materials for space solar power satellites, mirrors, solar panels.

You know, I think there's a lot of sort of construction materials and building materials, and raw materials for manufacturing that, that would come from the moon. I'm not entirely convinced that the moon is going to be a great source of of metals. There's certainly metals there but I I think they're they're chemically bound in minerals. And, you know, wherein metallic asteroids, they basically just exist as giant hunks of metal. Maybe maybe you could argue this point.

I think this was the first the first day I was at NASA Ames. 4 years ago, actually, this month. And we were sitting down talking with Lynn Harper, Dan Raske, and and Bruce Pittman. And I know you know all 3 of those Yep. Individuals. And Bruce had said to me, do you know where platinum comes from? And ignorant as I might have been or just not informed, however you wanna look at it, I said mining. And he said no. They're it's not indigenous to Earth.

And then he went on to explain a little bit about where they came from. They come from asteroids. He didn't go into a large description. And then he said, but if you look at the moon, what do you see? And you see, where asteroids have hit. And he said, platinum has hit the moon, and there's an abundance of platinum up there. There's an infinite amount I mean, more than we've used in the history of mankind, already exist just on the moon itself. Would you argue that point?

No. Not in not not entirely. I I would I would simply say that I don't believe we have enough data to know. I I think it's a it's a logical point and I think it's it's it's probably true. I don't know that we have data that would say, here's a big platinum deposit on demand. So it's an it's a sumptive point based upon the fact that we know millions of asteroids have hit the moon and therefore, because asteroids contain platinum or iron or some of these other Yeah. Some some asteroids.

Yeah. So some asteroids. So the odds are that there are asteroids that have hit and there's no tectonic plate movements and there's no, water runoff and there's a variety of other contributing factors that the chances are that it will be more aggregated. And if and if it if it hit, it's still there. Yeah. If it's hit, it's still there. Yeah. Okay. That's what let's get let's go on to your metals, irons, nickels, platinum then, and and everything.

Or you wanna have anything more with the power of the sun and what the possibilities are with that. Yeah. I'll get to that on my last bullet point. But just Okay. Keep that keep that that number in mind. 10 trillion times. Okay. And then the metal, iron, nickel, platinum Yeah. That was just an example that, you know, a single large metallic asteroid, would contain enough iron, nickel, platinum group metals, to meet human needs for 1000000 of years.

And, there is one known example of of a large, it's a fairly famous example of a large metallic asteroid. It's out in the main asteroid belt. It's called 16 Psyche. And, there's a NASA mission, that's in the planning stages to go visit that thing. And, I think that would be a pretty awesome object to go visit.

So, you know, if you wanted to estimate the value of that object in in Earth terms at today's prices, you know, it would be in the in, you know, the 1,000,000,000,000 of quadrillions of dollars, that kind of a that kind of a number. Numbers that of staggering magnitude. Far exceeding the, you know, 100 of years of GDP of the entire earth. So let's take just a few of these. You've only named you named iron, nickel, platinum as the main, wheat. I think iron is an easier way, is an easier element.

It's an element. Right? Yes. To understand. Nickel and platinum, why are they valuable to us? Well, nickel is used in, in alloys of steel. So iron so basically what you would have in this kind of an asteroid are all the components of steel. Which is obviously a valuable commodity and can be used to make lots and lots of things. You know, the platinum group metals have, I think specialty uses in manufacturing. And, I think people talk about them, just because platinum is a precious metal.

And so, you know, conjuring images of platinum in people's minds, you know, is a good way to to, you know, trigger the, you know, there's gold in them in our hills kind of a kind of a kind of a notion. Is are there any other types of elements that we feel are really valuable within either Mearth or in the asteroids that you talk about? Is there anything else? Does it making metals doesn't seem to be the the number one thing on the list. There are other resources that we would need.

Are there any others that you feel would have a large contribution to, our Earth and the way we live? That are material, sort of mineral resources? On an asteroid or or on the moon, is there anything else? Because we've I know there's something that they've talked about Helium 3. Yeah. That's true. About it. Yeah. Helium 3 is, you know, has been the subject of discussion for a long time. You know, the Apollo astronaut, Jack Schmitt wrote an entire book on it called Mining the Moon for Helium 3.

The reason Helium 3 is important or might be important, hopefully will be important is that helium 3 is a ingredient for fusion reactors. And in fact, you know, a fusion reaction that is based on helium 3, produces almost no harmful byproducts. So Helium 3 fusion would be, would be super clean. And, you know, fusion from an energy generation standpoint is is incredibly efficient. You know, the problem with, with Helium 3 on the moon is that it's, it's very diffuse.

And it was it's been deposited on the surface of the moon over 1,000,000,000 of years by the solar wind. And it's built up in the in the surface, you know, top few centimeters actually. And, you would you would need to mine, you know, many many, you know, large acreage of of lunar surface to get, you know, small amounts of Helium 3. But if you had it, it's it would be as a as a fuel for fusion, it would be incredibly valuable. And what about the others?

Magnesium, selenium, all of the do they contribute in a way? Yes. I mean, the easiest way to think about it is, essentially every element that we need for an industrial civilization is available in great abundance in the solar system. Compared to earth. There are a few things that are that are pretty rare. For example, you know, uranium for fission type energy creation. You know, the standard stop nuclear power plants that we have today. Uranium appears to be very rare in asteroids.

There may be some indication that there's some uranium on the moon that would be worth worth going after. But again, I think those indications are pretty sketchy at this point. There's just not enough information. Okay. So, so what is the first economic use of the resources? How do you see this playing out? Yeah. So, so I think the, the, the commodity that, that'll be economically viable soonest is harvesting water and then splitting that water into hydrogen and oxygen.

Liquid oxygen, liquid hydrogen happen to be the most efficient chemical propellants known. And there are transportation systems today that utilize it, including those of my former employer, United Launch Alliance. And once you can fuel transportation systems from fuel sourced in space, you break that tyranny of the rocket equation.

You know, the reason that it's so expensive to go to space is that we live at the bottom of a very deep gravity well and the energy needed to escape that gravity and to generate enough velocity to stay in orbit is enormous. And, you know, people are making progress in lowering the cost of launch but, you can't make progress on changing the laws of gravity. And so that that barrier is always going to be there.

So once you can escape and stay escaped from the gravity well and create economic activity that's self sustaining inside space and doesn't require transportation to and from earth to be viable, Once you have that, then all of the economics change in a in a very favorable direction. The cost of transportation collapses to just the cost of of the fuel itself. And, that's what we've always wanted.

Whereas today, the, you know, the cost of doing anything in space is dominated in large part by, the enormous cost of launching from earth into into orbit. So they the first economic use of the resource is hydrogen and oxygen. What other uses besides propellant would we be what are we going after first? So Is that it? Is that is that the one thing? Go after water and, you know, I've I've talked to, you know, one of my talking points is that, I believe water will be the oil of space.

You know, so think about, you know, the importance of oil to a worse economy. You know, our entire transportation system, is dependent on it. And the same will be true in space, but in that case, the resource will be water. And water happens to be fairly ubiquitous in space. It's on the moon, we know. It's super abundant on Mars. Many of these near Earth asteroids contain great quantities of water. Either as just pure ice or chemically bound into hydrated minerals.

Where you can, you know, you can release it by heating it up. And if you have water, you have fuel for transportation. But you also have, you know, drinking water for people. People need water. Plants need water. So the economy, you know, the economy in space, in Mearth in particular, is gonna be built on a foundation of water. And, we even have started to talk about, you know, the water economy in space. Because it has so many uses.

And you know, a third use I'll I'll I'll mention is when you have water, you have hydrogen and oxygen, the constituents of water. When you break it into propellants, you actually end up creating a whole bunch of excess oxygen which is something that humans obviously need, to live. So water, you know, water does all kinds of things for us. And it also happens to be one of the most, efficient pound for pound, radiation shielding materials, that that we know of.

So you can do all kinds of things with water in space. So using it as a, a dome, putting it within a dome as a way to stop radiation or putting it within the walls of of rocketry? Or a habitat if you had, you know, for example, the, you know, the the the gateway that NASA's been looking at, you know, water, you know, in bags that are stored in, you know, in the hull of a space habitat. You know, number 1, it provides great radiation shielding and then number 2, you can you can drink it.

But it doesn't absorb any radiation? It it does. It's great radiation shielding. It it, It's a it's a shielding but when you drink it Yeah. When you drink Just the radiation. Well, you you know, imagine a water economy. You're replenishing it. So you have your storage does double duty as water storage for drinking water or or washing water, as well as while it's sitting there, it's radiation shielding.

Okay. But it does it does it absorb does water absorb the radiation which becomes bad for drinking? No. Or no? No. It'll just Okay. It'll just it just deflects it. Yeah. Oh, it's more of a deflector than an absorber? Yeah. So it is a complete shield. Okay. So, the next point was abundant water, from ice. In terms of I mean, the earth I I saw a graphic recently. It was the earth.

And they if they took all the earth and made it the water made it into a ball, it's actually quite small because it's sitting on the surface of this massive rock. Yep. When we think about, let's say the the Mearth, environment and then we go further out, how much water are we talking about? Oh, if you yeah. If you go if you go way out, it's, you know, there's enormous quantities of water. The moons of Jupiter, the moons of Saturn, some of them are, you know, largely water.

And then you go out, you know, Pluto is is a big snowball. But, you know, in the inner solar system, there's quite a bit of water. The moon, you know, when the Apollo missions were flown, you know, the data we got back was that the moon was dry. It was, you know, a desiccated rock. But over the last, say 20 years, we've learned that there's actually water in the poles of the moon and it's kind of it's kind of interesting when you, you know, earth is is tilted 21 degrees relative to the sun.

That's what gives us our seasons. Right? The Moon is only tilted 1 and a half degrees relative to the Sun. So the poles of the Moon always receive grazing sunlight. Just like, you know, the North Pole would in, you know, at one of the solstices. You know, the suns were always right on the horizon. And if you have a crater or any kind of depression near the lunar poles, those are what are called permanently shadowed regions. They never see sun.

And because of that, and that, you know, they never see sun and they they are also looking to deep space, those regions are super cold. You know, 100 of degrees, you know, below 0 Celsius or say 40 Kelvin.

And the theory is, is that over over the millennia, you know, over the over 100 of 1000000 and billions of years, occasionally a water rich comet has struck the moon and if the water was in the equatorial regions, it gets heated up and cooled down and when it gets heated up, it sublimates into vapor and it kinda wanders, you know, does sort of a random walk around the surface of the moon.

If any of those water molecules make them, make their way into those permanently shadowed regions, they freeze and they get stuck. It's called a cold trap. And about 7, 8 years ago, a NASA mission crashed a spent upper stage, actually from, one of my former employer's rockets, a Centaur upper stage, into the Cabeas crater on the moon near the south pole.

Created a big debris cloud and then, they had instruments that interrogated that debris cloud and discovered that there was somewhere between 5 10% water in that debris plume that was sent up by the, that projectile. And so we have a one very firm data point that says there's water at the poles of the moon and some fairly significant abundance.

So the the, the name again that was thrown at the was, sent hit hit the moon was called a It was a It was a It was a center stage of an Atlas rocket called Centaur. Okay. The the, you know, the Greek Yep. Mythical creature that has the horse and the horse body and human torso. So they just directed it towards the moon, it hit, and they were using spectroscopy or all sorts of devices to be able to Yeah. It was primarily spectroscopy, to interrogate the debris plume that came up.

And, and you know, they found a fair amount of stuff. You know, there was in terms of things you would call volatiles, those, you know, molecules that would evaporate if it wasn't so cold. There was mostly water. There was some other more nasty kinds of things like hydrogen sulfide. There was actually even a little bit of methane. And, you know, any of those things could have industrial uses on the Moon. But the primary thing that, has value right now would be water for propellant.

So you've got a combination. You've got asteroids that have hit, comets that have hit, and then you've got the the freeze and stuck Yep. The cold trap taking in vapor that has, from the surfaces, been heated up. It vaporizes and and moves and then redrops like dew does during the in a fog or something. It drops because it hits and then it freezes again and now it stays at the poles. And I think it was 21 degrees on the earth. Is that what's the the axis? Yeah. And then only 1 and a half.

The moon is 1. Yeah. 1 and a half for the moon. So that's kind of a lucky lucky coincidence because, you know, if the moon was tilted like the, like the earth is, those permanently shadowed regions would not be permanently shadowed. And therefore, the, you know, those volatiles would get evaporated again and evaporated and probably eventually, they would all escape into space. So in terms of you have the we just talked about the abundance of water.

Do actually, I'd like to ask, do we know how much water? So we only have one hard data point. There have been other kinds of measurements that have been taken. You know, there's, there's, currently several orbiters. You know, the U. S. Has had one. The United States has had one called, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter that's been up there for 6 or 7 years, doing detailed mapping.

There's been other, other countries, India, Japan have had, satellites that have gone to the moon and, and gathered data. Japan have had, satellites that have gone to the moon and gathered data to the Chinese. And so they're starting to become, you know, a wealth of evidence that there's water down there. Some estimates put it as high as 10,000,000,000 tons per pole.

Which is quite a nice resource and would, you know, be a source of propellant for for, for the Mearth economy for, you know, generations. Do you what does the earth have in terms of water? Do you know that these have 10,000,000,000 tons? Oh, I I just I don't know. Way way way more than that. Your oceans are have have a lot of water. Okay. So, the next mining lunar ice, how do you see this happening Is the next bullet point.

Yeah. So I So like I said, you know, the the the ice will be a source of propellant which would be a great export from the moon. And, my former employer was actually me. I, publicly set a price that, would be viable for ULA to pay for water or propellant in the cislunar in the Mearth space. 500, you know, just just for grands, the number on the surface of the Moon was $500 a kilogram.

And then, up at say, Lagrange point, you know, the say the Earth Moon Lagrange point number 1, the point that's balanced between the Earth and the Moon, the price would be a bit higher, around $1,000 a kilogram. So the the prices already exist. They're commercial customers like ULA. I think NASA would be a would be a I think NASA would be a would be a willing customer if the if the, supply existed.

And, so the basic idea is you gotta figure out how to extract that ice from within those permanently shadowed regions and, and, Colorado, Colorado School of Mines, we did a study last fall that showed that we could build a mining operation and meet the price point, that ULA had set, the $500 a kilogram. And so, you know, that was a high level architecture study. You know, so there are a lot of details yet to be worked out.

But, first blush is there is an economic, there's a business case today, for establishing mining infrastructure on the surface of the moon. So $500 for a kilogram Mhmm. Sounds like a lot. What does that give us at that price? It enables the the business case that, that ULA was using was lowering the cost to move satellites from low Earth orbit to geosynchronous orbit.

And, the basic idea is that you launch a satellite into low earth orbit, refuel the upper stage and then move with propellant from the Moon and then move that satellite from low Earth orbit to geosynchronous orbit. And so what we were doing was comparing the cost, to do that mission using propellant from earth to the cost if you had propellant, from the moon. And that's what set the $500 a kilogram price.

So it's it's basically just an economic number that we're saying is you're going to if we can get it there and we can set up a facility and we can mine it and use it in this context, it's enough to make it viable Correct. At 500. Correct. How do we mine it? So How do we mine water? So we so our study looked at 3 different methods. You know, the first one was was the classical, you know, put a backhoe out there, you dig up the regolith.

Which is a, you know, it's a mixture of, you know, think of it as either, ice cementing rocks together or, dirty snow. It's somewhere in that range and we really don't know. But you're scooping up that material which is, we call it icy regolith. It's a mixture of dirt and rocks and ice. You put it in an oven, heat it up. You don't have to heat it very far. You're not melting the water, you're sublimating it. So you're going directly from ice to vapor.

And then you capture the vapor and re freeze the vapor and now you have relatively pure ice that you can take over to a processing facility where you split it using electrolysis, like you may have done in a high school chemistry class. You split it into hydrogen and oxygen. Okay. And then those are liquefied. One of the benefits of being in these really cold regions is that liquefying the propellant, which is normally a very expensive operation, ends up being very easy. Because it's cold.

Outside. It's cold. Yeah. Okay. You don't need a refrigerator. Don't need a refrigerator. You got a natural refrigerator. So you got the you got the backhoe for time. Let's get the other 2. What are the other two approaches that we could use? So the so the the second one is is a little more clever. So the idea here is that you don't dig up the regolith because that that's energy, you know, intensive. You drill holes and you emplace heaters in the holes.

And so you're heating the regolith in place from within and you're vaporizing the ice and the ice escapes up and out and you have like a dome shaped tent that would collect that captures that vapor and then passages to cold, other cold traps, on the side where it refreezes. And so, you know, this one involves a lot fewer moving parts.

And then the third method is redirecting sun light with solar concentrators into the into the apex of a dome and then just directly heating the surface, and vaporizing the ice. Heating from top down and again vaporizing the ice and capturing it within a tent like dome. Cool. And so that one actually, if it works, would be the cheapest of all because it has almost no moving parts. It's kind of And and, yeah, and you're just using the sun as a as a ref you're reflecting the sun.

Yes. So Yeah. It's like using a magnifying glass to start a fire. Yep. Okay. So then, last one, space solar power. What what did you wanna give us about the space solar power? We talked to the 10 to the trillion, power output. Yeah. What about space solar power? Yeah. So so to to to really make the the space economy take off, at least initially, the space economy has to deliver value to people on earth.

You know, that's where the consumers are, the people that, you know, in a free market, consumers drive the economy. And so you need to be able to figure out ways to deliver value. You couple that with the idea that, you know, energy, the energy economy on earth right now is a $7,000,000,000 to $10,000,000,000 market place. And so, there's a lot of capital capability in that energy marketplace.

And you couple that with the with the notion that fossil fuels are finite and that they have, you know, their political consequences, to to utilizing fossil fuels these days and tapping into solar power from space, fixes a number of the problems that that terrestrial based solar power has. You know, number 1, in space there's no night. There's no weather. There are no seasons.

And so the direct incidence of solar energy in say a geosynchronous orbit is 4 or 5 times greater than it is on the surface of the earth. So you have that efficiency gain. And then you beam the energy down to earth in diffuse microwaves. It's received on earth in a, what's called a rectenna. That's a piece of jargon, but think of it as a large antenna made of a grid of wires. And these are large, you know, these would be large arrays, you know, kilometers on a side or kilometers in diameter.

But the beauty of it is, is it's they would be an open array of wires so you could put them, you know, mount them on poles, you know, 10 feet high and grow corn underneath it or or, you know, it it doesn't unlike terrestrial solar where you have these, you know, sheet like solar panels that you can't really do anything with the land other than have a solar power farm. With these rectennas you can, you know, the land can have other uses as well.

And so the idea is that, you know, a network of solar power satellites could provide all of the energy needs of earth, essentially forever in a manner that's completely green and has very few, if any, negative environmental consequences. So, just to jump for one second, again, time wise one not too long on it. Diffuse microwaves, what what does that mean? So the the same kind of waves that that you have in a microwave oven.

So they're, you know, it's electromagnetic radiation or or waves like light, but, you know, longer wavelength than light, shorter wavelength than radio waves. And, you know, there's not So you put your hand in a microwave you put your hand in a microwave, that's not a good thing? Yeah. So that that's concentrated microwaves. You these would be diffuse microwaves and not harmful.

Okay. So you're just that you're you're using and in space, you have satellites that are grabbing these with solar arrays, I'm assuming. So similar to what we've seen in television shows, movies, whatever. They we grab them, and then it's beamed down to earth in this diffuse. And this can power everything from homes to ships to, even the military, I know, has been looking at these type of technologies to be able to service, military men within the field so that they don't have to transport fuel.

Correct. Correct. So the negative on space solar power is that these satellites are enormous objects. They're kilometers on a side, to have any sort of appreciable, you know, power output. And launching them from earth has always been unaffordable. If you can use lunar resources to build these satellites in space, then we've done some calculations that show that the affordability drops right down into the same range that, that any other terrestrial power plant is today.

And so here's an example of how space resources, in particular, lunar resources, could enable, you know, a true energy revolution, for earth. And completely obviate the need for fossil fuels. The out of all this, what's the most exciting thing to you out of everything you've worked on with, Resources or United Launch Alliance? What's what really gets you pumped? Well, right right now, what's getting me pumped is the results of our study last fall.

So, you know, if you've been a space geek like me for most of your life, you know, you can, you know, we've been able to imagine this future of, you know, humans moving beyond Earth and settling, you know, the Moon, settling Mars, you know, expanding outward into the solar system and beyond. And we can imagine it. We have science fiction books, you know, that can fill libraries and science fiction movies and we can we can imagine all this.

This this recent result that says, you know, we can emplace the first major chunk of infrastructure, this mining infrastructure, and make money without relying on governments to fund everything and the politics therein, you know, now, in my own mind, I'm starting to see the path. You know, you can start to connect the dots from where we are right now today to this future of a robust space faring civilization. And I don't think we've had that in the past.

I think there's always been this kind of a leap of faith that says, somehow all this money is gonna come, you know, pouring in and we're gonna go build colonies and things. And, you know, that faith has has not been borne out. It's been 50 years since Apollo and we still haven't been back. And that's been frustrating. And so I I to me, it's exciting to see a commercial commercialization path that appears to be viable.

Well, this is exactly the type of information that I was looking for for Project Moon Hut. And as you do know, you've heard, we've spoken before at events, and you've heard me that Project Moon Hut is desire one of our one of our active, engagements is to accelerate the space and earth based ecosystem.

Something such as this information that you've shared today will hopefully spark not just the the people in the space industry, but the enthusiasts who are interested in trying to understand what's the value, whether it could be to for an environmentalist who's concerned about climate change or an individual who's concerned about society and the, the shift based upon artificial intelligence, machine, machine learning, robotics, 3 d printing, synthetic engineering, the species on earth that are damaged by fossil fuels, that are burned.

There's so many different values to understanding this. So I thank you very much for giving us an in-depth look at what value of space resources can deliver to to all species on earth. So I appreciate that. Yeah. No. My pleasure. So as always to everybody, you can check out project moon hut.org where you can participate and sign up into a database system that we're creating. And we're not gonna go into details, but it'll be available to you over time as we're working on it.

So, that's one thing I'd suggest you do. The second is participate at facebook.comforward/projectmoonhot. You can like us and be connected. And then the last is, connect with us at Twitter at projectmoonhot and give us a little tap. And as we move forward, we're we're not going to inundate you with information. However, we're going to be value slowly and hopefully progressively, giving you more and more reason to participate in this earth and space based ecosystem.

So to everybody out there, I'm David Goldsmith, and thank you for listening. Hello, everyone. This is David Goldsmith, and welcome to another amazing, hopefully amazing, Project Moon Hut podcast series program, the age of infinite, where we look to learn from individuals from around the world as we are seeking to establish sustainable life on the moon through the accelerated development of an earth and space based ecosystem. Our desired outcome is to change how we live on earth for all species.

Today, we have another amazing guest on the line, George Sowers. How are you, George? I'm great, David. How are you? Great. Let's George has a few little quick points. You can read his bio online. George just retired from the United Launch Alliance. He is now teaching at Colorado School of Mines. And as, he's a physicist. So he's going to come at this, in an angle that I'm not a physicist, so I hope to learn a lot.

So, George, the name of the program that we've decided to title this today is the value of space resources. So I'm expecting a tremendous amount from you. I hope you're up for it. I'm I'm up for it. Okay. So, you haven't outlined or bullet points or something that we can follow so we can all learn together. What what are they? Okay. So I have 7 bullets. So get ready to write. Yes. I'm pen in hand. 1st bullet. Space resources will spur the 3rd great economic revolution for humankind.

The first two being the agricultural revolution and the industrial revolution. Okay. That's a long one. Go ahead. Alright. Bullet point number 2. Resources contained just within the inner solar system are nearly infinite when compared to resources available on earth. Okay. Got it? Yep. And I'm gonna give you two examples. The power output of the sun is 10 trillion times the power consumption of the world.

Second example, just one large metallic asteroid contains enough iron, nickel and platinum group metals to meet current consumption for 1000000 of years. So it's iron, nickel, and what's the third one? Platinum Group Metals. Platinum, that's what I thought. Okay. Next. 1 of the first economically viable uses of space resources will be liquid oxygen, liquid hydrogen propellants from water. Okay. Next. There's abundant water at the lunar poles in the form of ice.

Okay. Mining lunar ice for propellant will be an economic underpinning for future lunar settlement. Alright. And last but not least, space solar power can supply earth's energy needs for the foreseeable future with almost no negative environmental impact, and is affordable if materials come from the man. Okay. So let's start with the first one. First item on our list is space resources spurring the 3rd great evolution. Revolution. Revolution. Revolution. Tell me about it. What what's here?

What do you how did you come up with this? What what should we know? What should I know? So this is placing space resources in the context of human evolutionary history and economic history. Humans evolved, you know, on the order of a 100000 years ago in Africa, started out as hunter gatherers. And as hunter gatherers, that lifestyle, you know, didn't allow for a lot of luxury. There was not a lot of in in economic terms, you characterize it in in, in terms of energy capture.

So if you're a hunter gatherer, you're only Wait. Wait. Wait. Just I gotta in in, you call you just jumped to energy capture. Right. So is that is that something that's commonly referred to when you're talking about this space? Or is this is this a physics type equation? Or It's a it's a it's an, it's it's obviously based in physics because energy is a physics concept, but it's also a concept in economics. Oh, okay. I never I never had heard that and even in the economics classes I've taken.

So that was an interesting jump. Okay. In terms of energy capture It's a it's a proxy for wealth, if you wanna think about it like that. Okay. The amount of energy that a society can harness, is directly related to the amount of wealth that that that that society can generate. Okay. So hunter gatherers weren't wealthy, in a material sense.

And their energy capture was only on the order of 4 or 5000 kilocalories per person per day, you know, which is just a little bit more than you need, you know, to eat. And they had so they had very little energy left over to create artifacts or, you know, build structures or anything like that.

About 10000 years ago, some clever hunter gatherers figured out if they saved some of the seeds they had been gathering and sowed them in in, you know, opportune spots and took care of them that they could, reduce the amount of labor it took them to go gather food. And, you know, that was sort of the genesis of the agricultural revolution, Took place in the, you know, the Middle Eastern regions of the world.

And by those clever means, they were able to increase their energy capture from the 4 to 5000 of hunter gatherers up to 10 to maybe even up to 30,000 kilo calories per person per day. And what that enabled was tremendous population explosion, the creation of civilizations and empires and all the accoutrements of civilization, things like writing and and, you know, building civil engineering projects. All those sorts of things, were enabled by the economic benefits of the agricultural revolution.

Of course there were downsides. There was additional disease and and wars and crowding and overpopulation and all those sorts of things. But fundamentally, the economic plight of humanity was, was bettered, by almost an order of magnitude. Around 300 years ago was the 2nd great economic revolution and that was when some clever Englishmen figured out how to harness fossil fuels.

This is energy that had been, you know, put away in rocks you know for 5 to 600000000 years in, in the form of coal in England at the time. And, that enabled another quantum leap in energy capture, up to say maybe, you know, in the modern days up to say 250,000, calories per person per day in the Western world. And space resources is the next big revolution which will generate another quantum leap through accessing resources that are unlimited with respect to resources available on earth.

Our fossil fuel resources that our modern society is dependent on right now are finite. They'll run out someday although, you know, peak oil keeps moving away from us in time. Isn't that amazing? It went from peak oil was supposed to be past decade within this period of time and and Shell just completely changed that. Oh, yeah. And, you know, technology, you know, people don't count on technology advancing and so our ability to to find more and extract more, continues to increase.

But, nevertheless, it is finite because it's all earth based. And, it also has unintended consequences, you know, generating things like pollution and and, you know, potentially climate change. So looking ahead to that next that next leap is utilizing the resources of space and bringing those resources within the economic sphere of humankind and that will be the next great economic revolution. That's where we get Mearth. Mearth is, is the first step on the road. It's the first step on the road.

So we're so across the, have you ever thought about, just thinking about this moment, have you ever thought about what would the after space resources, what would be the next one? Well, space is pretty large. No. I know that. I just we've got human. We've got the agriculture. We've got the industrial revolution. What what's after space? I I for a second, I said to myself, what would be next? Well, it's it's it's bringing more and more of space into our economic sphere.

You know, the first step is is Mearth or or cislunar space. The next step is the inner solar system. The next step is the entire solar system. The step after that is other star systems, potentially the entire galaxy. There was a Russian astronomer, last name was Kardashev who came up with a numbering scheme. He said if, you know, for for, you know, advanced civilizations. And if you're a civilization of category 1, you control the resources of your entire planet.

You're able to control the resources of your entire planet. If you're a category 2, you control the resources of your entire solar system. Category 3, you control the resources of the entire galaxy. And Kardashev stopped at 3, but you can imagine, you know, a category 4. Do you know how to spell Kardashev? I'd have to look it up real quick. That's okay. We can Starts with a k. I'm gonna yes. K a r t I s h e v. Kardashev. Kardashev. K a r a kardashev. Shev. Yep. Yep. Okay. Good enough.

Okay. So, anymore? I mean, is there anything you wanna add to the space resources component side? And Well, that was that was kind of the first bullet point. Yeah. That's why I was just making sure. Is there anything else you want to add to that before we go into the resources? That's the that's the big claim. That's the space resources are gonna, you know, create evolutionary revolutionary change, for the human species, for the good of the human species.

And, you know, you can you can start to think about, you know, post scarcity economies or economies that have super abundance of things, almost everything that that people want or need. And, imagine what that would that would be like and, and what that would entail. Okay. So let's get on to the second, the resources within our solar system. Right. So the second bullet is the resources contained just within the inner solar system. And by inner solar system, I mean, everything from Jupiter inward.

It includes the asteroid belt, Mars, Earth, obviously, Venus, Mercury, and and all of the, sort of near Earth objects which are basically asteroids that have been kicked out of their asteroid belt orbit by the gravity of Jupiter and swing down in, into the close proximity of Earth. So the resources contained just within that geographic region are nearly infinite compared to the resources available just on earth.

So so the the term infinite, when you use that, how does your mind get you how do you get your mind around that? It's a it's a it's a single word that you can use to to characterize large magnitude differences. And that's why that's why my 3rd bullet was a couple of examples. And, you know, one of the one of the resources in the inner solar system is the energy produced by the sun.

And, you know, that's a, you know, that's an energy source that that, you know, powers everything that we do on Earth today. Because even the fossil fuels that we use 5 or 600000000 years ago were, you know, ancient plants and trees that absorbed, that energy from the sun and then converted into hydrocarbons and then were buried for 100 of 1000000 of years inside the Earth. So even even our fossil fuels owe their existence to solar energy, ultimately.

But the solar energy that's incident on earth right now is a tiny, tiny fraction of what's actually available, of what's actually being put out by the sun because we can only capture what, you know, the energy from the sun is radiating out in all directions. And we're a tiny little dot in that entire radiation pattern. And so I made the point that, one example is that the power output of the sun is 10 trillion times the power consumption of earth right now.

That just says there's a lot of energy out there to go capture to enable that future economic growth. So so within question going back. Why did why in your thinking is do you use Jupiter, Mars, Venus, Mercury, and the asteroid belt? What would be the reason for not using the rest of our solar system? It's a it's it's an accessibility thing. You know, it's kinda like starting with Mearth or cislunar space. You know, it's it's close.

You can imagine, you know, accessing that space in the fairly near future. And you can imagine accessing the inner solar system on a, you know, maybe slightly more delayed but similar kinda time frame. You know, the outer solar system is, you know, the the the gas giants out there, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, it gets to be tougher and tougher to, access resources out there. But that would be the next step after you, start harnessing the inner solar system.

Now could you, to some degree, say that within Mearth, there is also an infinite number of resources because we're getting the same sun. Sun doesn't change for us. And we can harness we can't we will never be able to harness as much as possible outside of a certain range for us. So we've got Mearth with the moon and all the resources from all the asteroids that have hit, the moon, millions of them as I've been told, and within that space.

So could we say to a large degree that just Mearth itself and Mearth being defined as moon and earth in that in that space of about 200 and 70 290,000 miles including a radius around each one of them. Wouldn't you say that we could have infinite possibilities just there? Yeah. I wouldn't, infinite possibilities, yes. In infinite. The agent the infinite infinite resources Resources. For humankind. Resources, not entirely.

The the, the moon is a source of resources, has there's there are a couple of things that are that are, I think, gonna be very economically important for the moon. And I in in one of the subsequent bullets, you know, we'll talk about, water in the form of ice. The moon is is pretty devoid of, of of metals that are readily, extracted. And the water resources on the moon are probably somewhat limited. We don't really know the extent of it.

You know, there's a pretty wide range in the estimates of the water available on the moon. It's certainly enough to to really get things jump started. And, and then I would include within Mearth, I would. Some other people may not. Many near Earth objects which are just as accessible, as as the moon is in in terms of, you know, the ease of transportation. And, that dramatically increases the amount of resources if you include those.

And and that's what in Project Moon Hunt, we are looking at that sphere. So we've got the asteroids that are within. We've got the moon itself. We've got the sun. And if you were to look, and as you said, it's the ushering in of the age of infinite. It's the first step. Right. Is that if we can harness that, it would change how we live on earth for all species. It would change how we, I would assume, it would change, or give us a tremendous amount of resource compared to what we have today.

That's correct. That's absolutely correct. And then and then it's the the stepping stone to even more resource. So I I don't know if you you cover it, but I do wanna ask you in terms of that Mearth space because you have metal, iron, nickel, platinum. When you look at that sphere of Mearth, what do you what resources are there in abundance that we won't have or we can get a different scale or different opportunities beyond that space range?

Yeah. So so our not you know, our knowledge of, you know, our precise knowledge of what resources are available on the moon is is is limited. You know, we haven't had, you know, prospecting type missions and things of that nature, to map out the resources. We know, you know, we know that there's water on the poles of the Moon and that's, that's huge. That's hugely important because water creates, you know, from water you can make propellant. So now you have the oil.

I I have, And we can go over that bullet point after I just Yeah. We could talk about water after. I just what other items with what I've been told is that meteors, not asteroids, have hit the moon. There are millions that have hit the moon. They're going to be carrying all different types of resources that we some of them might not even know about. And just not even the context of the moon itself. But from those, there's a tremendous amount of value in resources.

Yeah. I think that I think that's true. It's it's not well characterized. And I, you know, that's one of the that, you know, that that prospecting phase is one of the first steps. Is to find out what's really there.

But, you know, the things that we do know about, you know, for example, the samples that have, that were returned by the Apollo astronauts, you know, those are, you know, mostly, you know, silica based rocks, you know, so you can think of, of, you know, construction materials and and, things of that nature, raw materials for space solar power satellites, mirrors, solar panels.

You know, I think there's a lot of sort of construction materials and building materials, and raw materials for manufacturing that, that would come from the moon. I'm not entirely convinced that the moon is going to be a great source of of metals. There's certainly metals there but I I think they're they're chemically bound in minerals. And, you know, wherein metallic asteroids, they basically just exist as giant hunks of metal. Maybe maybe you could argue this point.

I think this was the first the first day I was at NASA Ames. 4 years ago, actually, this month. And we were sitting down talking with Lynn Harper, Dan Raske, and and Bruce Pittman. And I know you know all 3 of those Yep. Individuals. And Bruce had said to me, do you know where platinum comes from? And ignorant as I might have been or just not informed, however you wanna look at it, I said mining. And he said no. They're it's not indigenous to Earth.

And then he went on to explain a little bit about where they came from. They come from asteroids. He didn't go into a large description. And then he said, but if you look at the moon, what do you see? And you see, where asteroids have hit. And he said, platinum has hit the moon, and there's an abundance of platinum up there. There's an infinite amount I mean, more than we've used in the history of mankind, already exist just on the moon itself. Would you argue that point?

No. Not in not not entirely. I I would I would simply say that I don't believe we have enough data to know. I I think it's a it's a logical point and I think it's it's it's probably true. I don't know that we have data that would say, here's a big platinum deposit on demand. So it's an it's a sumptive point based upon the fact that we know millions of asteroids have hit the moon and therefore, because asteroids contain platinum or iron or some of these other Yeah. Some some asteroids.

Yeah. So some asteroids. So the odds are that there are asteroids that have hit and there's no tectonic plate movements and there's no, water runoff and there's a variety of other contributing factors that the chances are that it will be more aggregated. And if and if it if it hit, it's still there. Yeah. If it's hit, it's still there. Yeah. Okay. That's what let's get let's go on to your metals, irons, nickels, platinum then, and and everything.

Or you wanna have anything more with the power of the sun and what the possibilities are with that. Yeah. I'll get to that on my last bullet point. But just Okay. Keep that keep that that number in mind. 10 trillion times. Okay. And then the metal, iron, nickel, platinum Yeah. That was just an example that, you know, a single large metallic asteroid, would contain enough iron, nickel, platinum group metals, to meet human needs for 1000000 of years.

And, there is one known example of of a large, it's a fairly famous example of a large metallic asteroid. It's out in the main asteroid belt. It's called 16 Psyche. And, there's a NASA mission, that's in the planning stages to go visit that thing. And, I think that would be a pretty awesome object to go visit.

So, you know, if you wanted to estimate the value of that object in in Earth terms at today's prices, you know, it would be in the in, you know, the 1,000,000,000,000 of quadrillions of dollars, that kind of a that kind of a number. Numbers that of staggering magnitude. Far exceeding the, you know, 100 of years of GDP of the entire earth. So let's take just a few of these. You've only named you named iron, nickel, platinum as the main, wheat. I think iron is an easier way, is an easier element.

It's an element. Right? Yes. To understand. Nickel and platinum, why are they valuable to us? Well, nickel is used in, in alloys of steel. So iron so basically what you would have in this kind of an asteroid are all the components of steel. Which is obviously a valuable commodity and can be used to make lots and lots of things. You know, the platinum group metals have, I think specialty uses in manufacturing. And, I think people talk about them, just because platinum is a precious metal.

And so, you know, conjuring images of platinum in people's minds, you know, is a good way to to, you know, trigger the, you know, there's gold in them in our hills kind of a kind of a kind of a notion. Is are there any other types of elements that we feel are really valuable within either Mearth or in the asteroids that you talk about? Is there anything else? Does it making metals doesn't seem to be the the number one thing on the list. There are other resources that we would need.

Are there any others that you feel would have a large contribution to, our Earth and the way we live? That are material, sort of mineral resources? On an asteroid or or on the moon, is there anything else? Because we've I know there's something that they've talked about Helium 3. Yeah. That's true. About it. Yeah. Helium 3 is, you know, has been the subject of discussion for a long time. You know, the Apollo astronaut, Jack Schmitt wrote an entire book on it called Mining the Moon for Helium 3.

The reason Helium 3 is important or might be important, hopefully will be important is that helium 3 is a ingredient for fusion reactors. And in fact, you know, a fusion reaction that is based on helium 3, produces almost no harmful byproducts. So Helium 3 fusion would be, would be super clean. And, you know, fusion from an energy generation standpoint is is incredibly efficient. You know, the problem with, with Helium 3 on the moon is that it's, it's very diffuse.

And it was it's been deposited on the surface of the moon over 1,000,000,000 of years by the solar wind. And it's built up in the in the surface, you know, top few centimeters actually. And, you would you would need to mine, you know, many many, you know, large acreage of of lunar surface to get, you know, small amounts of Helium 3. But if you had it, it's it would be as a as a fuel for fusion, it would be incredibly valuable. And what about the others?

Magnesium, selenium, all of the do they contribute in a way? Yes. I mean, the easiest way to think about it is, essentially every element that we need for an industrial civilization is available in great abundance in the solar system. Compared to earth. There are a few things that are that are pretty rare. For example, you know, uranium for fission type energy creation. You know, the standard stop nuclear power plants that we have today. Uranium appears to be very rare in asteroids.

There may be some indication that there's some uranium on the moon that would be worth worth going after. But again, I think those indications are pretty sketchy at this point. There's just not enough information. Okay. So, so what is the first economic use of the resources? How do you see this playing out? Yeah. So, so I think the, the, the commodity that, that'll be economically viable soonest is harvesting water and then splitting that water into hydrogen and oxygen.

Liquid oxygen, liquid hydrogen happen to be the most efficient chemical propellants known. And there are transportation systems today that utilize it, including those of my former employer, United Launch Alliance. And once you can fuel transportation systems from fuel sourced in space, you break that tyranny of the rocket equation.

You know, the reason that it's so expensive to go to space is that we live at the bottom of a very deep gravity well and the energy needed to escape that gravity and to generate enough velocity to stay in orbit is enormous. And, you know, people are making progress in lowering the cost of launch but, you can't make progress on changing the laws of gravity. And so that that barrier is always going to be there.

So once you can escape and stay escaped from the gravity well and create economic activity that's self sustaining inside space and doesn't require transportation to and from earth to be viable, Once you have that, then all of the economics change in a in a very favorable direction. The cost of transportation collapses to just the cost of of the fuel itself. And, that's what we've always wanted.

Whereas today, the, you know, the cost of doing anything in space is dominated in large part by, the enormous cost of launching from earth into into orbit. So they the first economic use of the resource is hydrogen and oxygen. What other uses besides propellant would we be what are we going after first? So Is that it? Is that is that the one thing? Go after water and, you know, I've I've talked to, you know, one of my talking points is that, I believe water will be the oil of space.

You know, so think about, you know, the importance of oil to a worse economy. You know, our entire transportation system, is dependent on it. And the same will be true in space, but in that case, the resource will be water. And water happens to be fairly ubiquitous in space. It's on the moon, we know. It's super abundant on Mars. Many of these near Earth asteroids contain great quantities of water. Either as just pure ice or chemically bound into hydrated minerals.

Where you can, you know, you can release it by heating it up. And if you have water, you have fuel for transportation. But you also have, you know, drinking water for people. People need water. Plants need water. So the economy, you know, the economy in space, in Mearth in particular, is gonna be built on a foundation of water. And, we even have started to talk about, you know, the water economy in space. Because it has so many uses.

And you know, a third use I'll I'll I'll mention is when you have water, you have hydrogen and oxygen, the constituents of water. When you break it into propellants, you actually end up creating a whole bunch of excess oxygen which is something that humans obviously need, to live. So water, you know, water does all kinds of things for us. And it also happens to be one of the most, efficient pound for pound, radiation shielding materials, that that we know of.

So you can do all kinds of things with water in space. So using it as a, a dome, putting it within a dome as a way to stop radiation or putting it within the walls of of rocketry? Or a habitat if you had, you know, for example, the, you know, the the the gateway that NASA's been looking at, you know, water, you know, in bags that are stored in, you know, in the hull of a space habitat. You know, number 1, it provides great radiation shielding and then number 2, you can you can drink it.

But it doesn't absorb any radiation? It it does. It's great radiation shielding. It it, It's a it's a shielding but when you drink it Yeah. When you drink Just the radiation. Well, you you know, imagine a water economy. You're replenishing it. So you have your storage does double duty as water storage for drinking water or or washing water, as well as while it's sitting there, it's radiation shielding.

Okay. But it does it does it absorb does water absorb the radiation which becomes bad for drinking? No. Or no? No. It'll just Okay. It'll just it just deflects it. Yeah. Oh, it's more of a deflector than an absorber? Yeah. So it is a complete shield. Okay. So, the next point was abundant water, from ice. In terms of I mean, the earth I I saw a graphic recently. It was the earth.

And they if they took all the earth and made it the water made it into a ball, it's actually quite small because it's sitting on the surface of this massive rock. Yep. When we think about, let's say the the Mearth, environment and then we go further out, how much water are we talking about? Oh, if you yeah. If you go if you go way out, it's, you know, there's enormous quantities of water. The moons of Jupiter, the moons of Saturn, some of them are, you know, largely water.

And then you go out, you know, Pluto is is a big snowball. But, you know, in the inner solar system, there's quite a bit of water. The moon, you know, when the Apollo missions were flown, you know, the data we got back was that the moon was dry. It was, you know, a desiccated rock. But over the last, say 20 years, we've learned that there's actually water in the poles of the moon and it's kind of it's kind of interesting when you, you know, earth is is tilted 21 degrees relative to the sun.

That's what gives us our seasons. Right? The Moon is only tilted 1 and a half degrees relative to the Sun. So the poles of the Moon always receive grazing sunlight. Just like, you know, the North Pole would in, you know, at one of the solstices. You know, the suns were always right on the horizon. And if you have a crater or any kind of depression near the lunar poles, those are what are called permanently shadowed regions. They never see sun.

And because of that, and that, you know, they never see sun and they they are also looking to deep space, those regions are super cold. You know, 100 of degrees, you know, below 0 Celsius or say 40 Kelvin.

And the theory is, is that over over the millennia, you know, over the over 100 of 1000000 and billions of years, occasionally a water rich comet has struck the moon and if the water was in the equatorial regions, it gets heated up and cooled down and when it gets heated up, it sublimates into vapor and it kinda wanders, you know, does sort of a random walk around the surface of the moon.

If any of those water molecules make them, make their way into those permanently shadowed regions, they freeze and they get stuck. It's called a cold trap. And about 7, 8 years ago, a NASA mission crashed a spent upper stage, actually from, one of my former employer's rockets, a Centaur upper stage, into the Cabeas crater on the moon near the south pole.

Created a big debris cloud and then, they had instruments that interrogated that debris cloud and discovered that there was somewhere between 5 10% water in that debris plume that was sent up by the, that projectile. And so we have a one very firm data point that says there's water at the poles of the moon and some fairly significant abundance.

So the the, the name again that was thrown at the was, sent hit hit the moon was called a It was a It was a It was a center stage of an Atlas rocket called Centaur. Okay. The the, you know, the Greek Yep. Mythical creature that has the horse and the horse body and human torso. So they just directed it towards the moon, it hit, and they were using spectroscopy or all sorts of devices to be able to Yeah. It was primarily spectroscopy, to interrogate the debris plume that came up.

And, and you know, they found a fair amount of stuff. You know, there was in terms of things you would call volatiles, those, you know, molecules that would evaporate if it wasn't so cold. There was mostly water. There was some other more nasty kinds of things like hydrogen sulfide. There was actually even a little bit of methane. And, you know, any of those things could have industrial uses on the Moon. But the primary thing that, has value right now would be water for propellant.

So you've got a combination. You've got asteroids that have hit, comets that have hit, and then you've got the the freeze and stuck Yep. The cold trap taking in vapor that has, from the surfaces, been heated up. It vaporizes and and moves and then redrops like dew does during the in a fog or something. It drops because it hits and then it freezes again and now it stays at the poles. And I think it was 21 degrees on the earth. Is that what's the the axis? Yeah. And then only 1 and a half.

The moon is 1. Yeah. 1 and a half for the moon. So that's kind of a lucky lucky coincidence because, you know, if the moon was tilted like the, like the earth is, those permanently shadowed regions would not be permanently shadowed. And therefore, the, you know, those volatiles would get evaporated again and evaporated and probably eventually, they would all escape into space. So in terms of you have the we just talked about the abundance of water.

Do actually, I'd like to ask, do we know how much water? So we only have one hard data point. There have been other kinds of measurements that have been taken. You know, there's, there's, currently several orbiters. You know, the U. S. Has had one. The United States has had one called, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter that's been up there for 6 or 7 years, doing detailed mapping.

There's been other, other countries, India, Japan have had, satellites that have gone to the moon and, and gathered data. Japan have had, satellites that have gone to the moon and gathered data to the Chinese. And so they're starting to become, you know, a wealth of evidence that there's water down there. Some estimates put it as high as 10,000,000,000 tons per pole.

Which is quite a nice resource and would, you know, be a source of propellant for for, for the Mearth economy for, you know, generations. Do you what does the earth have in terms of water? Do you know that these have 10,000,000,000 tons? Oh, I I just I don't know. Way way way more than that. Your oceans are have have a lot of water. Okay. So, the next mining lunar ice, how do you see this happening Is the next bullet point.

Yeah. So I So like I said, you know, the the the ice will be a source of propellant which would be a great export from the moon. And, my former employer was actually me. I, publicly set a price that, would be viable for ULA to pay for water or propellant in the cislunar in the Mearth space. 500, you know, just just for grands, the number on the surface of the Moon was $500 a kilogram.

And then, up at say, Lagrange point, you know, the say the Earth Moon Lagrange point number 1, the point that's balanced between the Earth and the Moon, the price would be a bit higher, around $1,000 a kilogram. So the the prices already exist. They're commercial customers like ULA. I think NASA would be a would be a I think NASA would be a would be a willing customer if the if the, supply existed.

And, so the basic idea is you gotta figure out how to extract that ice from within those permanently shadowed regions and, and, Colorado, Colorado School of Mines, we did a study last fall that showed that we could build a mining operation and meet the price point, that ULA had set, the $500 a kilogram. And so, you know, that was a high level architecture study. You know, so there are a lot of details yet to be worked out.

But, first blush is there is an economic, there's a business case today, for establishing mining infrastructure on the surface of the moon. So $500 for a kilogram Mhmm. Sounds like a lot. What does that give us at that price? It enables the the business case that, that ULA was using was lowering the cost to move satellites from low Earth orbit to geosynchronous orbit.

And, the basic idea is that you launch a satellite into low earth orbit, refuel the upper stage and then move with propellant from the Moon and then move that satellite from low Earth orbit to geosynchronous orbit. And so what we were doing was comparing the cost, to do that mission using propellant from earth to the cost if you had propellant, from the moon. And that's what set the $500 a kilogram price.

So it's it's basically just an economic number that we're saying is you're going to if we can get it there and we can set up a facility and we can mine it and use it in this context, it's enough to make it viable Correct. At 500. Correct. How do we mine it? So How do we mine water? So we so our study looked at 3 different methods. You know, the first one was was the classical, you know, put a backhoe out there, you dig up the regolith.

Which is a, you know, it's a mixture of, you know, think of it as either, ice cementing rocks together or, dirty snow. It's somewhere in that range and we really don't know. But you're scooping up that material which is, we call it icy regolith. It's a mixture of dirt and rocks and ice. You put it in an oven, heat it up. You don't have to heat it very far. You're not melting the water, you're sublimating it. So you're going directly from ice to vapor.

And then you capture the vapor and re freeze the vapor and now you have relatively pure ice that you can take over to a processing facility where you split it using electrolysis, like you may have done in a high school chemistry class. You split it into hydrogen and oxygen. Okay. And then those are liquefied. One of the benefits of being in these really cold regions is that liquefying the propellant, which is normally a very expensive operation, ends up being very easy. Because it's cold.

Outside. It's cold. Yeah. Okay. You don't need a refrigerator. Don't need a refrigerator. You got a natural refrigerator. So you got the you got the backhoe for time. Let's get the other 2. What are the other two approaches that we could use? So the so the the second one is is a little more clever. So the idea here is that you don't dig up the regolith because that that's energy, you know, intensive. You drill holes and you emplace heaters in the holes.

And so you're heating the regolith in place from within and you're vaporizing the ice and the ice escapes up and out and you have like a dome shaped tent that would collect that captures that vapor and then passages to cold, other cold traps, on the side where it refreezes. And so, you know, this one involves a lot fewer moving parts.

And then the third method is redirecting sun light with solar concentrators into the into the apex of a dome and then just directly heating the surface, and vaporizing the ice. Heating from top down and again vaporizing the ice and capturing it within a tent like dome. Cool. And so that one actually, if it works, would be the cheapest of all because it has almost no moving parts. It's kind of And and, yeah, and you're just using the sun as a as a ref you're reflecting the sun.

Yes. So Yeah. It's like using a magnifying glass to start a fire. Yep. Okay. So then, last one, space solar power. What what did you wanna give us about the space solar power? We talked to the 10 to the trillion, power output. Yeah. What about space solar power? Yeah. So so to to to really make the the space economy take off, at least initially, the space economy has to deliver value to people on earth.

You know, that's where the consumers are, the people that, you know, in a free market, consumers drive the economy. And so you need to be able to figure out ways to deliver value. You couple that with the idea that, you know, energy, the energy economy on earth right now is a $7,000,000,000 to $10,000,000,000 market place. And so, there's a lot of capital capability in that energy marketplace.

And you couple that with the with the notion that fossil fuels are finite and that they have, you know, their political consequences, to to utilizing fossil fuels these days and tapping into solar power from space, fixes a number of the problems that that terrestrial based solar power has. You know, number 1, in space there's no night. There's no weather. There are no seasons.

And so the direct incidence of solar energy in say a geosynchronous orbit is 4 or 5 times greater than it is on the surface of the earth. So you have that efficiency gain. And then you beam the energy down to earth in diffuse microwaves. It's received on earth in a, what's called a rectenna. That's a piece of jargon, but think of it as a large antenna made of a grid of wires. And these are large, you know, these would be large arrays, you know, kilometers on a side or kilometers in diameter.

But the beauty of it is, is it's they would be an open array of wires so you could put them, you know, mount them on poles, you know, 10 feet high and grow corn underneath it or or, you know, it it doesn't unlike terrestrial solar where you have these, you know, sheet like solar panels that you can't really do anything with the land other than have a solar power farm. With these rectennas you can, you know, the land can have other uses as well.

And so the idea is that, you know, a network of solar power satellites could provide all of the energy needs of earth, essentially forever in a manner that's completely green and has very few, if any, negative environmental consequences. So, just to jump for one second, again, time wise one not too long on it. Diffuse microwaves, what what does that mean? So the the same kind of waves that that you have in a microwave oven.

So they're, you know, it's electromagnetic radiation or or waves like light, but, you know, longer wavelength than light, shorter wavelength than radio waves. And, you know, there's not So you put your hand in a microwave you put your hand in a microwave, that's not a good thing? Yeah. So that that's concentrated microwaves. You these would be diffuse microwaves and not harmful.

Okay. So you're just that you're you're using and in space, you have satellites that are grabbing these with solar arrays, I'm assuming. So similar to what we've seen in television shows, movies, whatever. They we grab them, and then it's beamed down to earth in this diffuse. And this can power everything from homes to ships to, even the military, I know, has been looking at these type of technologies to be able to service, military men within the field so that they don't have to transport fuel.

Correct. Correct. So the negative on space solar power is that these satellites are enormous objects. They're kilometers on a side, to have any sort of appreciable, you know, power output. And launching them from earth has always been unaffordable. If you can use lunar resources to build these satellites in space, then we've done some calculations that show that the affordability drops right down into the same range that, that any other terrestrial power plant is today.

And so here's an example of how space resources, in particular, lunar resources, could enable, you know, a true energy revolution, for earth. And completely obviate the need for fossil fuels. The out of all this, what's the most exciting thing to you out of everything you've worked on with, Resources or United Launch Alliance? What's what really gets you pumped? Well, right right now, what's getting me pumped is the results of our study last fall.

So, you know, if you've been a space geek like me for most of your life, you know, you can, you know, we've been able to imagine this future of, you know, humans moving beyond Earth and settling, you know, the Moon, settling Mars, you know, expanding outward into the solar system and beyond. And we can imagine it. We have science fiction books, you know, that can fill libraries and science fiction movies and we can we can imagine all this.

This this recent result that says, you know, we can emplace the first major chunk of infrastructure, this mining infrastructure, and make money without relying on governments to fund everything and the politics therein, you know, now, in my own mind, I'm starting to see the path. You know, you can start to connect the dots from where we are right now today to this future of a robust space faring civilization. And I don't think we've had that in the past.

I think there's always been this kind of a leap of faith that says, somehow all this money is gonna come, you know, pouring in and we're gonna go build colonies and things. And, you know, that faith has has not been borne out. It's been 50 years since Apollo and we still haven't been back. And that's been frustrating. And so I I to me, it's exciting to see a commercial commercialization path that appears to be viable.

Well, this is exactly the type of information that I was looking for for Project Moon Hut. And as you do know, you've heard, we've spoken before at events, and you've heard me that Project Moon Hut is desire one of our one of our active, engagements is to accelerate the space and earth based ecosystem.

Something such as this information that you've shared today will hopefully spark not just the the people in the space industry, but the enthusiasts who are interested in trying to understand what's the value, whether it could be to for an environmentalist who's concerned about climate change or an individual who's concerned about society and the, the shift based upon artificial intelligence, machine, machine learning, robotics, 3 d printing, synthetic engineering, the species on earth that are damaged by fossil fuels, that are burned.

There's so many different values to understanding this. So I thank you very much for giving us an in-depth look at what value of space resources can deliver to to all species on earth. So I appreciate that. Yeah. No. My pleasure. So as always to everybody, you can check out project moon hut.org where you can participate and sign up into a database system that we're creating. And we're not gonna go into details, but it'll be available to you over time as we're working on it.

So, that's one thing I'd suggest you do. The second is participate at facebook.comforward/projectmoonhot. You can like us and be connected. And then the last is, connect with us at Twitter at projectmoonhot and give us a little tap. And as we move forward, we're we're not going to inundate you with information. However, we're going to be value slowly and hopefully progressively, giving you more and more reason to participate in this earth and space based ecosystem.

So to everybody out there, I'm David Goldsmith, and thank you for listening.