How the First Private Moon Landing Will Spur the Future of Space Mining

Moon Express just became the first private company in history to be approved for a lunar surface mission. The California-based startup plans to land its 20-pound MX-1 spacecraft on the Moon in 2017.

"This is not only a milestone, but really a threshold for the entire commercial space industry,” Moon Express CEO Bob Richards told Space.com. "Somebody had to be first."

The decision, announced by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) on Wednesday, may sound the starting pistol for a new era in spaceflight, defined at least as much by commercial ventures and resource extraction as by scientific and exploratory missions. Mining the Moon for valuable materials has been a hot topic of speculationfor years, but with the FAA’s official greenlight, Moon Express is poised to force the issue.

That’s not to suggest, however, that the company’s 2017 lander will return to Earth laden with overflowing chests of Moon booty. At this point, the FAA has only approved Moon Express’s request to conduct a lunar surface mission, not mine it for resources.

“It appears that the FAA has granted a licence to Moon Express to carry out a permissible space activity,” Sa’id Mosteshar, director of the London Institute of Space Policy and Law, told me. “The licence does not give Moon Express any exclusive or property right. It merely permits Moon Express to launch a spacecraft, travel to the Moon, and land there.”

If successful, Moon Express’s landing will mark the first time any American organization has soft-landed a spacecraft on the Moon since Apollo 17 touched down in 1972. This kind of achievement is exactly what the emerging commercial space sector has always been hyped to accomplish. By untethering exploration from the purview of government agencies alone, space travel is becoming faster, cheaper, andmore widely accessible to the public.

Indeed, Moon Express already has some exciting experiments lined up for its mission. According to Richards, the lander might install a small “mooncam” observatory at its landing site that would be viewable to anyone through YouTube. The company is also angling to nab the $30 million Google Lunar X-Prize, so it will have to demonstrate that its MX-1 vehicle can move at least 500 meters, and send high definition imagery back to Earth.

But ultimately, Moon Express has its eyes on an even bigger prize: The Moon’s bountiful resources. Our natural satellite contains many precious materials, such as water, iron ore, and helium-3. Even the Moon’s normal regolith rock is treasured simply for its interplanetary exoticism.

“I believe that the first trillionaires will be generated by investments in space resources,” Richards said in a 2014 Motherboard documentary. “Our goal is that in 2020, we’ll bring something back that you can hold in your hand; between two to six kilograms of stuff. It could be worth upwards of a billion dollars. And then the game is on.”

It will be interesting to see how many other commercial players end up joining this game by following Moon Express’s lead. “There are already a number of private entities planning to go to the Moon and to carry out various activities there,” Mosteshar told me.

“However, until and unless it becomes clear that exploitation of lunar resources is permitted, I would not expect many investors to risk vast sums of money on attempting to mine the Moon or other celestial bodies.”

Striking that legal balance represents such uncharted territory that Moon Express had to work together with the FAA to figure out a temporary regulatory patch enabling the company to abide by both US law and international treaties for its 2017 mission. This is a promising cooperative starting point, but more comprehensive and consistent regulatory frameworks will have to be developed in order to ensure that off-Earth resources are managed sustainably.

To that point, some of the language that Moon Express executives have used regarding planetary mining is worth reflecting on, as the company celebrates its milestone achievement.

"We are now free to set sail as explorers to Earth's eighth continent, the Moon, seeking new knowledge and resources to expand Earth's economic sphere for the benefit of humanity," said Richards in a statement.

Referring to the Moon as “Earth’s eighth continent” seems dicey in light of the fact that all seven continents on our own planet are imperiled by human activity, much of it borne from unchecked industrial development. Likewise, Jain’s past comparisons of lunar mining to ocean resource extraction poses similar problems.

“I [...] think the Moon will be treated no differently than the international water in our oceans,“ Jain told the Los Angeles Times in 2011. “In this case, no one really owns the water but any company or country can mine the resources [...] as long as they follow certain safety/moral guidelines,”

Again, a statement like that would be much more comforting if Earth’s oceans weren’t in devastating ecological freefall as a result of human commercial pressures, much of which takes place in international waters.

Point being: We should tread carefully. Moon mining does have the potential to benefit humanity, but as with most commodities markets, the sticking will be ensuring that wealth generation does not slip into exploitation. Space exploration is our opportunity to transcend the self-destructive, provincial mindset nurtured by planetary living. Let’s not screw it up.

The first lunar road trip

1971 was a great year for the glorification of vintage American road trips. Hunter S. Thompson published Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, the Route 66 film Two-Lane Blacktop was released, and some of the Grateful Dead’s early “Road Trips” albums were recorded.

But despite all that competition stateside, the coolest American road trip of 1971 did not take place within the borders of the US. In fact, it didn’t even take place on the planet. On July 31, 1971, Apollo 15 astronauts David Scott and James Irwin took NASA’s sweetest set of wheels out for a spin on the Moon.

Setting out at 9:13 AM Eastern US time, the two men enjoyed a lovely Saturday drive through the lunar countryside, with sightseeing stops along the way. Their ride, NASA’s Lunar Roving Vehicle (LRV), was a “brilliant piece of engineering with sealed electric motors in the hub of each wheel,” according to Two Sides of the Moon, Scott’sjoint autobiography with Russian cosmonaut Alexey Leonov.

The trip was undertaken at the breakneck pace of six miles per hour, and marked the first time anyone had driven an automobile off Earth. Scott said this extreme offroading trip felt like “a cross between a bucking bronco and a small boat in a heavy swell.”

“Driving the rover was actually more like flying an airplane, albeit with four wheels, than driving a car,” Scott said. “Instead of a steering wheel, which would have been very difficult to grasp in our bulky suits, it was controlled with a joystick mounted on a control console between my seat and Jim’s. Despite our maximum speed of only seven or eight mph, the reduced gravity and very irregular surface meant one or more of the independently suspended wheels lifted away from the surface every time we hit uneven terrain.”

“Driving into the Sun was the most difficult, since the glare caused a ‘wash-out’ of the surface features,” he continued. “Though the rover could turn on a dime and had very good traction and power, the wire-mesh wheels kicked up impressive rooster-tails of dust, which were deflected by large fenders.”

On top of all that, Scott and Irwin must have been acutely aware that if they totaled their moon buggy, there would be no roadside assistance to help them get back to base. For that reason, the pair were instructed to drive only as far as they could walk with the oxygen in their life support systems, just in case the LRV broke down.

Over the course of six hours and 33 minutes, Scott and Irwin completed a southern traverse of about 5.6 miles around the Hadley–Apennine region of the Moon, located on the eastern edge of the massive Mare Imbrium crater (aka the right eye of the Man in the Moon). They hit up Elbow and Saint George craters along the way—picking up samples, taking pictures, and filming their activities—before heading back north to the Apollo 15 Falcon lunar module (LM). They subsisted on fruit sticks that had been packed into pouches below their chins during the drive.

For the most part, every detail of this inaugural interplanetary drive was heavily scrutinized by Mission Control in Houston. But Scott cheekily managed to get one “off the record” stop in on the way back to the Falcon.

“Once, when Houston prompted us to get moving and head home,” he recounted, “I was so determined to pick up a very interesting black rock, which I could see not far away sitting all alone on the gray surface without a speck of dust, that I had to resort to subterfuge.”

“I stopped the rover and pretended to adjust Jim’s seatbelt so that I could stoop to pick it up. This beautiful rounded piece of scoriaceous basalt was later dubbed the ‘seatbelt basalt.’”

Irwin hammed it up over the radio to Mission Control, to help buy his commander the time he needed to grab the rock. It’s worth taking a look at the transcript of that moment to grasp the sheer scampiness of this mad basalt caper. Here’s part one, featuring the “wink wink” moment between Scott and Irwin and their efforts to distract Joe Allen at Mission Control.

Scott: Oh, there's some vesicular basalt right there, boy. Oh, man! Hey, how about...? Let's just hold on one second, we've got to have...
Irwin: Okay; we're stopping.
Scott: Let me get my seatbelt.
Allen: Roger; mark that you stopped.
Scott: It keeps coming off.
Irwin: Why don't you hand me your seatbelt?
Scott: Just a minute.
Irwin: Then get off. (Pause)
Scott: If I can find it. (Pause) There it is. (Pause) If you'll hang on to it here for a second.
Irwin: Okay, I've got it. (Long Pause)
[Unbeknownst to Houston, Dave has stopped to pick up a piece of the basalt.]

You have to love the unbridled enthusiasm with which Scott first acknowledges the rock, and the conspiratorial pauses that follow. But it only gets better from there.

Allen: And are you moving again?
Irwin: No, we're stopped here, Joe. I'll let you know when we move.
Allen: Roger. (Long Pause)

Irwin: You know, Joe, these small fresh craters that we've commented on, whatever caused them must create [...] or indurate the soil into the rocks (that is) creates its own rocks (regolith breccia), because there's just a concentration of rocks around the very fresh ones (craters). And by 'small' I'm talking about may be a foot to three feet diameter.

Allen: Rog, Jim. Sounds very plausible.
Irwin: ...And create the (lost under Joe) breccia.
Scott: Okay, ready to hand me my (seatbelt)...
Irwin: Yeah. (Pause) Get it (probably the piece of basalt)?
Scott: Yep. (Long Pause)
[Dave has finished getting the sample and is getting seated. The sampling has probably taken about a minute and 40 seconds.]

The way Irwin casually diverts Allen’s attention by expounding on his surroundings is pretty hilarious in retrospect. The secretly obtained basalt was not discovered until Apollo scientists stumbled on it in the mission’s rock boxes, prompting Scott to fess up to his hijinx.

Of course, that was not the only time the Apollo 15 crew bent the rules a little. A more famous example is the postage stamp scandal that erupted in the wake of the astronauts’ return, when it was discovered that the men had taken unauthorized stamp covers to the Moon, for resale.

But for the most part, the mission that debuted the first lunar road trips was so productive that NASA called it the “most successful manned flight ever achieved” at the time. Scott and Irwin took the LRV out for two more drives on August 1 and 2, notching the rover’s odometer up to a mission total of 27.8 kilometers (17.3 miles).

In an era when road trips were becoming the trendiest way to explore our planet, the adventurous crew of Apollo 15 took the tradition to the next level.