Excerpt / Summary Earth’s Moon can be looked upon as an enormous Earth-orbiting Space Station, a natural satellite outside of Earth’s gravity well, with raw materials that can be put to practical use as humanity expands outward into the Universe. As outlined in previous chapters, new remote-sensing data for the Moon have reinvigorated lunar science and improved understanding of the Moon’s composition, the ages of its prominent formative events, and the character of the earliest lunar crust and its subsequent geologic evolution. In this chapter, we consider how we might use lunar materials for exploration, utilization, and development of the Moon. The Moon offers a nearby location from which to develop resources and capabilities to explore further in the Solar System. The natural resources of the Moon include minerals, rocks, and soils, which can be processed to produce metals, oxygen, glass, ceramics, and other useful products (McKay et al. 1992). Water ice may exist near the poles and low concentrations of volatiles deposited by solar wind (H, He, C, N) … |