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David Friedberg: The Moon is the Next Industrial Frontier
“ I think the moon could end up being the next industrial frontier for humanity.
And the reason is, if you can get to the moon, it has an extraordinary abundance of material that we can mine, process, and manufacture into goods.
And ultimately the cost to ship those goods back to the Earth is zero.
And the reason is that on the moon, you can take advantage of the low gravity, it's about 1/6 the gravity, and the complete lack of an atmosphere, meaning that it's frictionless to move material off of the moon and very low energy to move it off of the moon.
In fact, the design for moving material off of the moon is to use what's called a mass driver, which is like a train track, like a rail, like an electric rail.
And you could put a package on that rail and use electricity to accelerate that package to 100 G-Force, shoot it back to the earth, or theoretically shoot it to Mars, and it will go to the exact point on the Earth you want it to go to, reenter the atmosphere, and land with a simple parachute where you want it to go.
So we could run continuous mining, continuous manufacturing processes on the moon at a fraction of the cost of what it would take to do it here on Earth.”
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