Monitor | Mining on the moon? That's sheer lunacy
When it comes to space, costs are in a different orbit, but China can't admit its grand dreams are more about national vanity than economics
Early yesterday morning China launched its latest venture into space: a Long March rocket carrying a lunar-lander complete with a robotic moon buggy known as Yutu or Jade Rabbit.
If the landing and the rover's deployment go as planned, the technological achievement will be considerable. Following last year's successful docking of a crewed vessel with an orbiting laboratory, China's latest launch places it firmly in the front rank of current space exploration, and prepares the ground for a planned manned moon mission some time within the next 10 years.
Less clear is the purpose of all this activity. Enthusiasts for China's space programme have waxed lyrical about the vast wealth to be generated mining rare and valuable elements on the moon. But even the most ardent exponent of extra-planetary mineral exploitation must realise the idea is lunacy.
Everything to do with space exploration is excruciatingly expensive. Even getting stuff to low earth orbit, a couple of hundred kilometres up, costs more than US$20,000 a kilogram. Going higher costs considerably more.
By the time you've flown something to the height of GPS satellites, 20,000 kilometres up, it is quite literally worth more than its weight in gold. And the moon is 380,000 kilometres away.
Whatever the science fiction fantasists believe, flying heavy mining equipment to the moon isn't feasible. Neither is bringing minerals back.
The United States' Apollo moon-landing programme of the 1960s and 1970s cost US$20.4 billion in the dollars of the day. In today's money that equates to around US$120 billion, or around US$20 billion for each manned landing.