Whoever's first to mine anything in space - moonies, Mars Rangers,
or asteroid miners, it doesn't matter. The result is the same.

The asteroid miners will always win the economic picture.

Any earth, moon, and Mars mines will have to close down -- they just
can't compete with asteroid miners.

Now, if the materials are in the asteroids, what are we doing on the
moon and Mars?

If it's mining, what are we mining?

Okay, here is a different strategy. There are many
types of asteroids. One way of classifying them is
based off their spectral type (based off of telescopic
spectroscopy that tango and i have mentioned
previously).

The most common of all NEA are C-Type (roughly 75% of
all NEAs) and S-Type (17% of all NEAs). C-type are
carbonaceous chondrites and based off meteorite
samples, they contain NO volatiles (this includes
helium-3). S-type are silicateous asteroids with a
high metal content (mainly nickle and iron). M-type
is another asteroid which is made purely of
nickle-iron and these are rarer still.

Why do I bring this up? Because you need to
understand where to go for different materials. If
your looking for volatiles, none of these are very
good. Though some C-type asteroids may contain water
(the classification of asteroids is kinda iffy). What
you are really wanting are the elusive dormant comets.
I only say elusive because they have not been found
yet, mostly due to the fact that they would have a
dark albedo and thus be very hard to discover using a
telescope.

Anyhow, to understand the advantage of different
locales, you need to understand the resources at each
of them. For instance, the Moon has lots of oxygen,
silicon and aluminum (for a good listing of crust
composition, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon).
However, it is very poor in nickle (which is needed
for steel) so for that you would need to go to an
asteroid.

Many asteroids on the other hand are very poor in the
three ingredients that make up the majority of the
moon, so you would go there for those.

Anyhow, I highly recomend you learn more about the
geology of these places. A good start is wikipedia
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid) and
www.permanent.com.

Good luck,

Ryan Z

--- George Perkins wrote:

About half of the asteroids are water-rich.

The moon, compared to asteroids, is extremely low in both volatiles
and metals.

About your only hope for survival, if nothing's shipped to you from
space, is the craters. And you'll have to search these things. I
figure if you check out five or six of them, one should be good
enough for basic life and building needs for awhile.

Locate yourself at that crater, of course.

--- In spacesettlers@yahoogroups.com, Ryan Z wrote:

Helium-3 is on the moon, asteroids, rocks, and dust particles in
space.

I'm not talking astronaut skin particles here. LOL!

These things have been up there a long time.

--- In spacesettlers@yahoogroups.com, "George Perkins"
>
> About half of the asteroids are water-rich.
>
> The moon, compared to asteroids, is extremely low in both
volatiles
> and metals.
>
> About your only hope for survival, if nothing's shipped to you
from

--- In spacesettlers@yahoogroups.com, "George Perkins"
>
> Helium-3 is on the moon, asteroids, rocks, and dust particles in
> space.
>
> I'm not talking astronaut skin particles here. LOL!
>
> These things have been up there a long time.

Maybe your astronauts can go collect the dust with chopsticks, just
like the Karate Kid when he caught the fly. Of course the dust will
be moving at 5 km/s so the astronauts should probably get super-
duper training from Miyagi-san. At least I'm offering plans and
details when I flesh out your schemes.

TangoMan