《Building Dreams From Moondust 》作者：- Mike Combs【EPUB】

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Certainly many early space thinkers have contemplated use of the moon’s resources in proposed lunar colonization programs. But probably the first to consider use of lunar materials for the construction of a wide variety of useful structures throughout cislunar space was the Princeton University physicist Gerard K. O’Neill.


After surprising himself with calculations indicating how large an Earthlike space habitat could be built, the next question was: From what do we build these high-orbiting settlements? Lifting construction material from the Earth’s surface could immediately be ruled out. Even assuming the lift cost reductions then being promised by NASA for their proposed new Space Shuttle (can you remember those days?), sending the parts up from Earth for even one of the more modest of O’Neill’s designs would overwhelm the most extravagant budget imaginable.


But then O’Neill made a simple calculation. The amount of energy needed to lift a kilogram of material from the surface of the moon into a High Earth Orbit (HEO) is about 1/20th what is needed to lift it from Earth to that same orbit. This fact points to our moon as the source of the raw materials needed to settle orbital space.


What is there to mine on the moon? From Apollo, we know ordinary lunar soil consists of: