Former NASA Astronaut Harrison Schmitt advocates a private, investor-based approach to returning humans to the Moon—to extract Helium 3 for energy production, to use the Moon as a platform for science and manufacturing, and to establish permanent human colonies there in a kind of stepping stone community on the way to deeper space. With governments playing a supporting role—just as they have in the development of modern commercial aeronautics and agricultural production—Schmitt believes that a fundamentally private enterprise is the only type of organization capable of sustaining such an effort and, eventually, even making it pay off.

Have you ever wondered how the Moon, outer space, Mars and beyond will be settled by humans? This book discusses the industrialization and settlement of the Moon, our stepping stone to free space, Mars, the solar system and ultimately the stars. It looks at the technical challenges of mining the Moon for all sorts of materials to build solar power satellites, spaceships and space settlements in orbit. Engineering students and professionals alike will enjoy this book and so will technically minded people of all sorts.

The moon is home to tons of metals, minerals, and other natural resources that people use. Would it be possible to mine these resources? The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and other space agencies around the world are working to find out. Explore the resources that have been found on the moon and what mining them could mean for the future.

Situated among the North Cascade Mountains of Washington State, in the Glacier Peak Wilderness Area, Miners Ridge contains vast quantities of copper. Kennecott Copper Corporation’s plan to develop an open-pit mine there was, when announced in 1966, the first test of the mining provision of the Wilderness Act passed by Congress in 1964. The battle over the proposed “Open Pit, Big Enough to Be Seen from the Moon,” as activists called it, drew the attention of both local and national conservationists, who vowed to stop the desecration of one of the West’s most scenic places. Kennecott Copper had the full force of the law and mining industry behind it in asserting its extractive rights. Meanwhile the U.S. Forest Service was determined to defend its authority to manage wilderness. An Open Pit Visible from the Moon tells the story of this historic struggle to define the contours of the Wilderness Act—its possibilities and limits. Combining rigorous analysis and deft storytelling, Adam M. Sowards re-creates the contest between Kennecott and its shareholders on one hand and activists on the other, intent on maintaining wilderness as a place immune to the calculus of profit. A host of actors cross these pages—from cabinet secretaries and a Supreme Court justice to local doctors and college students—all contributing to a drama that made Miners Ridge a cause célèbre for the nation’s wilderness movement. As locals testified at public hearings and writers penned profiles in the nation’s magazines and newspapers, the volatile political economy of copper proved equally influential in frustrating Kennecott’s plans. No law or court ruling could keep Kennecott from mining copper, but the pit was never dug. Identifying the contingent factors and forces that converged and coalesced in this case, Sowards’s narrative recalls a critical moment in the struggle over the nation’s wild places, even as it puts the unpredictability of history on full display.

Have you ever wondered how the Moon, outer space, Mars and beyond will be settled by humans? This book discusses the industrialization and settlement of the Moon, our stepping stone to free space, Mars, the solar system and ultimately the stars. It looks at the technical challenges of mining the Moon for all sorts of materials to build solar power satellites, spaceships and space settlements in orbit. Engineering students and professionals alike will enjoy this book and so will technically minded people of all sorts.

While the Moon was once thought to hold the key to space exploration, in recent decades, the U.S. has largely turned its sights toward Mars and other celestial bodies instead. In The Value of the Moon, lunar scientist Paul Spudis argues that the U.S. can and should return to the moon in order to remain a world leader in space utilization and development and a participant in and beneficiary of a new lunar economy. Spudis explores three reasons for returning to the Moon: it is close, it is interesting, and it is useful. The proximity of the Moon not only allows for frequent launches, but also control of any machinery we place there. It is interesting because recorded deep on its surface and in its craters is the preserved history of the moon, the sun, and indeed the entire galaxy. And finally, the moon is useful because it is rich with materials and energy. The moon, Spudis argues, is a logical base for further space exploration and even a possible future home for us all. Throughout his work, Spudis incorporates details about man's fascination with the moon and its place in our shared history. He also explores its religious, cultural, and scientific resonance and assesses its role in the future of spaceflight and our national security and prosperity.

This book produces convincing evidence that exploiting the potential of space could help solve many environmental and social issues affecting our planet, such as pollution, overcrowding, resource depletion and conflicts, economic inequality, social unrest, economic instability and unemployment. It also touches on the legal problems that will be encountered with the implementation of the new technologies and new laws that will need to be enacted and new organizations that will need to be formed to deal with these changes. This proposition for a space economy is not science fiction, but well within the remit of current or under development technologies. Numerous technologies are described and put together to form a coherent and feasible road map that, if implemented, could lead humankind towards a brighter future.

This extraordinary book details how the Moon could be used as a springboard for Solar System exploration. It presents a realistic plan for placing and servicing telescopes on the Moon, and highlights the use of the Moon as a base for an early warning system from which to combat threats of near-Earth objects. A realistic vision of human development and settlement of the Moon over the next one hundred years is presented, and the author explains how global living standards for the Earth can be enhanced through the use of lunar-based generated solar power. From that beginning, the people of the Earth would evolve into a spacefaring civilisation.

"Rare Earth Frontiers is a timely text. As Klinger notes, rare earths are neither rare nor technically earths, but they are still widely believed to be both. Although her approach focuses on the human, or cultural, geography of rare earths mining, she does not ignore the geological occurrence of these mineral types, both on Earth and on the moon.... This volume is excellently organized, insightfully written, and extensively sourced."―Choice Drawing on ethnographic, archival, and interview data gathered in local languages and offering possible solutions to the problems it documents, this book examines the production of the rare earth frontier as a place, a concept, and a zone of contestation, sacrifice, and transformation. Rare Earth Frontiers is a work of human geography that serves to demystify the powerful elements that make possible the miniaturization of electronics, green energy and medical technologies, and essential telecommunications and defense systems. Julie Michelle Klinger draws attention to the fact that the rare earths we rely on most are as common as copper or lead, and this means the implications of their extraction are global. Klinger excavates the rich historical origins and ongoing ramifications of the quest to mine rare earths in ever more impossible places. Klinger writes about the devastating damage to lives and the environment caused by the exploitation of rare earths. She demonstrates in human terms how scarcity myths have been conscripted into diverse geopolitical campaigns that use rare earth mining as a pretext to capture spaces that have historically fallen beyond the grasp of centralized power. These include legally and logistically forbidding locations in the Amazon, Greenland, and Afghanistan, and on the Moon.

The only work to date to collect data gathered during the American and Soviet missions in an accessible and complete reference of current scientific and technical information about the Moon.