Hubble Scans Moon

I saw this on NASA TV, they implied, but did not say, that they could use the titanium on earth in the future after extracting the oxygen now. Does this imply mass drivers on the moon as in Dr. O'Neil's original vision as shown in One Small Step Part II. (A Nova program from the 70's.) NASA, as far as I have been able to determine, has not thought seriously about mass-drivers since the Space Settlement studies of the 1970's. Perhaps a problem we need to work on. I think anytime NASA visualizes getting something off the moon, they're thinking about rockets (which represent a very uneconomical way to do it). But I find it strange that anybody at NASA would even imply thatlunar titanium might be brought down to Earth. It's difficult to imagine it ever being economically competitive with producing titanium here on Earth. O'Neill never promoted the idea of bringing space resources down to Earth, and I'm sure if he saw any way that it could be done profitably, he could see it later leading to use of space resources in space, and so would have enthusiastically embraced it. Of all the proposals, the only one I've heard that I would consider even an outside possibility is retrieval of platinum from NEOs. And that only for two reasons: 1. Platinum group metals are genuinely more concentrated in asteroids than in ores available to us in the crust of the Earth. 2. A common argument against bringing precious substances from space down to Earth is that vastly increasing the supply of a rare substance on the market would immediately depress its price, and you wouldn't have to depress it much to make it not worth the space transportation costs. But a counter-argument in the case of platinum is that if it were cheaper, fuel cells would become more common, and that this vast expansion of the platinum market would keep the bottom from dropping out. Even then, I'd consider such a business as a side business to constructing SPS from asteroidal material to be much more likely than as a stand-alone business. The SPSscenario would also be a good fit with increasedmarket forfuel cells.