From: vince@offshore.ai (Vincent Cate) Newsgroups: sci.space.policy Subject: Re: Asteroids or bust! References: <1085452653.88532@kyle.snap.net.nz> NNTP-Posting-Host: 209.88.68.230 Message-ID: <9186edb5.0405272343.d8c3269@posting.google.com> Ordover@aol.com (John Ordover) wrote in message news:... > > I am coming to the opposite conclusions as it seems possible to me to > > construct highly effective small unmanned lunavators that collect > > regolith without the need for any surface infrastructure. > > Who exactly are the customers lining up to buy regolith? It is not yet clear there would be. Just reading: http://www.meteorites.tv/lunar_meteorites.html They say there is a total of 30 lunar meteorites with a combined mass of only 6 Kg. Yet they are selling lunar meteorites for about $1000/gram. At this price the total value of all lunar meteorites would be $6 mil. If this is all true, the regolith is not really very valuable. On the other hand, millions of people are enthusiastic about humans going into space. It seems there are people who would pay for some regolith brough back from the moon when they would not pay for a lunar meteorite. I can imagine sellers including a video with each rock showing the area on the moon it came from, the actual picking up of the rock, and zooming in close for detail on the rock. This would make it so a customer could be rather confident that what he was buying was legit, and that he could sell it to someone else. It would also be fun. I think some people would buy lunar rocks to support space development. People donate to all kinds of things by buying something at an inflated price. But what the demand curve looks like is really an open question. At price like $200/gram you could probably sell more than $100 mil but it might be very hard to sell more than $1 bil at any price. Really hard to say. -- Vince