…privately. Yes, it’s ambitious, but I don’t think this is the problem:
The longer-term goals are laudable, but the company seems to seriously underestimate the difficulty of reaching lunar ice, harvesting it under extremely cold conditions, and producing propellant from ice. These are all significant engineering challenges in unprecedented conditions. Moreover, even under optimistic circumstances, NASA’s plans to return to the Moon wouldn’t put a handful of humans—let alone hundreds—on the lunar surface before the late 2020s, and China doesn’t intend for such landings until the early 2030s.
I don’t think that NASA’s or China’s plans are relevant to private lunar plans.
I don’t think mining lunar water will be hard, in terms of a commerical operation, rather it is finding a site to mine. and if NASA doesn’t find such sites by 2030- then NASA not exploring the Moon or there isn’t any minable lunar that can be found [by NASA].
Or If NASA does lunar exploration program, private sector should be able to mine lunar starting around 2030- if minable lunar water is found.
NASA’s plans to return to the Moon wouldn’t put a handful of humans—let alone hundreds—on the lunar surface before the late 2020s,
There is a big piece of the puzzle missing. What is NASA’s lunar prospecting program? They cancelled that one rover and said they were going to do lots of rovers and landers and that the different tasks that they would do would build up capabilities and participants to later support manned missions. Anyone seen anything about this recently?
As gbaikie says above, NASA needs to find good sites. Finding these sites doesn’t require SLS/Orion/Gateway and we shouldn’t be waiting or delaying the prospecting.
I fear that just like SLS/Orion/Gateway taking an infinite amount of time to become operational, that any NASA prospecting program could be much slower than what the private sector could do on their own. This is especially true if it is run like commercial crew and participants are entrapped in NASA’s bureaucracy.