As a flurry of recent news reports have shown, interest in the moon is increasing dramatically as China, India and a number of private companies are racing to establish bases on the moon and to put a lunar space station in orbit around it. Why? Because the moon turns out to have valuable resources needed on Earth – some of them currently in increasingly short supply – and hundreds of billions of dollars are being invested in getting at those resources, with the expectation of big profits and big advantages.
The resources in question include chlorine, lithium, beryllium, zirconium, uranium, thorium and the rare-earths needed for mobile phones, computers and wind turbines, as well as basalt, iron, quartz and silicon. But above all, the ‘regolith’ – the surface dust and…
