Four Billion Years of Impacts Have Covered the Moon in Resource-Rich Rubble

Four billion years of meteorite impacts have done something unexpected to the Moon. The continuous pulverisation of its surface has created a thick layer of regolith - loose rubble blanketing vast areas of the lunar landscape - and that rubble, it turns out, is rich in the raw materials that a sustained human presence would require.

Randall Carlson addresses the environmental objection directly. The volume of regolith covering the Moon is so immense that any extraction programme humanity could realistically undertake in the foreseeable future would make no discernible difference to the lunar surface. The scale of the resource dwarfs the scale of any conceivable human intervention. The Moon has been mining itself for four billion years. The question is simply whether we are ready to start using what it has already prepared.