Tie a String Around the Moon

When lovers profess they want to give each other the moon, I don’t think they are thinking moons over my hammy or the moon that’s out early tonight (as my grandson would say about the latter and all observable plumber’s cracks, crack kills). It’s more like telling your precious one that you love them to the moon and back, a really grand gesture to show the immensity of your love.

Well the title of this post is a bit misleading because what I really wanted to write about is a plan some scientists and engineers have to establish a base on the moon and from this base, a mining camp of sorts, lasso an asteroid (one of those we hear is coming closer and threatening to crash into us and cause our extinction, yada, yada..) and yep, you guessed it, they want to mine it. As I read recently in an article in a New Scientist magazine, the motivation for space travel is shifting from one of discovery to one of economics, and by this I mean the for-profit exploitation, rather than exploration, of space. There are a lot pros and cons to consider and they seem to center around the idea of whether or not it is ethical to save our pristine planet’s resources at the expense of the resources from what we consider desolate places like asteroids and the moon. Despite these arguments there are others that are not waiting for answers or regulations. It seems pretty obvious that this movement has already ready started and has prompted some to ask, Is space mining the next gold rush? Of course the technology for such enterprises is pretty much out of this world, and by that I mean the stuff we use here for such operations isn't exactly suitable for the conditions in space. This is where innovation exceeds my imagination. 

Space mining, seems to me to be a grand gesture that shows the immensity of human greed on one hand and ingenuity on the other.