Lunar and off Earth resource drivers, estimations and the development conundrum

Abstract

All human enterprise is based on the acquisition and use of natural resources. Space exploration highlights our greatest example of the potential utility and economic savings that would be gained in providing what is needed to spur large-scale settlement growth and operations during gravity-well hopping. As opposed to the pure economics behind resource location, extraction and production on Earth, the fruitful, successful and sustainable human expansion off Earth makes it imperative that we fully understand the distribution and abundance of extraterrestrial resources, combined with current technological capabilities and a highly defined user-base before human landing site selection can occur. A working model and methodology, entitled Planetary Resource Management System (PRMS), adapted from the terrestrial petroleum exploration model, serves as a guideline for defining extraterrestrial prospecting, which ultimately provides criteria for the selection of human landing sites. Correct selection, in fruition, will enable highly self-sustainable and growing human settlements on the lunar surface or elsewhere. Further discussions addressing the continued and potentially distracting misuse of common space-goals marketing points, used in promoting extraterrestrial mining and in situ resource utilization (ISRU), are examined in light of big picture usage, infrastructure and a priori needs. The present exemplar of extremely slow human population growth rates off Earth highlights the need for implementing the single concise goal of establishing growing and self-sustained human settlements on other worlds. Such a distinct goal will circularly drive the need for in situ resources and commercialization that the historical acquisition of basic scientific knowledge alone is incapable of rendering.