Mining Digital November 2021 | Page 69

About Guidehouse
INDUSTRY X . 0 ongoing rover missions illustrate . The challenges here are more economic ; spaceflight remains a costly and hazardous venture . But , with space launch costs falling due to the increasing reusability of launch vehicles and with growing interest in long-duration missions ( e . g ., Artemis ) in space , mining operations beyond Earth could become viable in the next 20 years .
Q . What would we mine for , and do we know it exists ? How much is there ? A . The prime targets are water , REEs , and metals like nickel , iron , and platinum . Water ice has been detected on the moon ,

About Guidehouse

Guidehouse is the only scaled consultancy in the world to fully integrate commercial and public or government businesses – from Wall Street to Washington , from the European Union to India . The firm has more than 12,000 employees and subject matter experts in 55 global markets . primarily in the permanently shadowed polar craters , as well as on comets and asteroids . Estimates of just how much water ice is present in either asteroids or the moon , however , are imprecise , with estimates of lunar water prevalence ranging from as little as 11 million tons to more than a billion tons . REE and metal deposits in asteroids are marginally more certain , with NASA estimating there to be at least 80,000 iron- and nickel-rich objects in the asteroid belt that are more than 1 km in diameter . Assuming all of these objects were mined , the value of the extracted
miningglobal . com 69