I read the article twice to be sure, but there was no mention of what ore bodies the Moon has or what their grades are.
People are attracted to mining the deep sea because there are seabed nodules and crusts that are enriched in valuable metals like cobalt, nickel, manganese, and copper:
A nodule containing 1% copper and 1% cobalt is a great ore.
These nodules are not found on the moon. As far as we know, no cobalt ore bodies of comparable richness are found on the moon. Transition metal ore bodies on Earth have been formed by Earth's geochemistry, including its hydrological cycle. The Moon does not have liquid water and its minerals are undifferentiated silicates.
Undifferentiated silicates are abundant on Earth. Trying to mine them is an exercise in getting $1 of metal from $10 of energy and chemicals. Trying to mine undifferentiated silicates on the Moon means getting $1 of metal from $10 of energy and chemicals plus $10,000 in transportation costs.
But why would you ever bring material back to earth that was mined on the moon? Why not just launch it in a earth or cislunar orbit. It’s more valuable there for use in space industry.
The moon has a lower delta v to orbit than earth does.
The same metals are available. One of the theories for nodule formation on the seabed floor is that they start from kernels deposited by astroid impacts in the ocean. These same impacts in the moon form craters with more than half of the impactor preserved in the central peak of the crater.
The main elements that would make sense to be mined from outside the Earth are those which on Earth have gone mostly into the inaccesible core of the planet, e.g. nickel, cobalt, germanium, the platinum-group elements. Such elements are indeed abundant in the iron meteorites, but they have low abundance in the lunar rocks.
The lunar rocks have huge quantities of iron, aluminum, titanium, manganese, which would be good for building structures on the Moon, but which are too cheap to be worthwhile to be brought to Earth.
I have not seen any estimate for this but I doubt that the total mass of iron meteorites that have fallen on the Moon is great enough to provide a quantity of valuable metals that would be worthwhile to be transported back to Earth.
Moreover, the iron meteorites that have fallen on the Moon are distributed uniformly over all it surface, they are not concentrated in some place like the ores on Earth. The cost of transportation until a processing place will be very large, because I doubt that there can be more than a few grams of iron meteorites per square meter.
Even with this extremely optimistic supposition, one would need to collect all the meteorites from several hundreds square kilometers to get a ton of cobalt (the average Co content in iron meteorites is a little less than 0.3%). For less abundant elements, like the platinum-group metals, the area will be multiplied by several orders of magnitude.
It is unlikely to find places on the surface of the Moon with significantly different chemical composition than other places, because the Moon has neither volcanoes nor flowing water, to create exploitable mineral concentrations.
The only chance to find a concentrated source of valuable elements on the Moon would be in the mascons (mass concentrations that are likely to be buried asteroids that have impacted the Moon early in the history of the Solar System), if any of the mascons is close enough to the surface to be reachable by digging.
Exploiting a Lunar mascon does not seem easy as their typical burial depth is estimated between 25 km and 125 km. Nevertheless, due to the lower gravity and to the lack of a hot interior, it might be possible to dig much deeper wells on the Moon than on Earth, e.g. maybe to a depth of 20 to 30 km, where some of the mascons could be reached.
There is no guarantee that any of the mascons has a metallic core, but the fact that they have a higher density than the Lunar rocks suggests that this is a possibility.
Honestly, if you mine only the dark side of the moon, people will never even notice. It's not like we are destroying any ecological niche, and the volume you remove is unlikely to be enough to influence moon gravity.
I think the dangerous part is political: who get the wealth out of the moon? That's going to be a heated debate.
2140: U.S., China on verge of war over Moon riches.
'CNN - The Chinese government says its patience is running out over a lack of progress in bilateral negotiations with the United States over the sharing of Lunar mineral resources in Sector 4. The U.S. government claims that it legally acquired the mineral rights to the area after being the first nation to activate a fission reactor within the perimeter. The Chinese government, on the other hand, claims to be the rightful owner of the mineral rights since the mineral discovery by the lunar probe Xi Jinping IV. Forces from 45th Marines Regiment, the 10th Space Force, the 3rd Space Infantry Division, and the 8th Space Force are on an elevated readiness level in Sector 4. These forces number approximately 24,000 troops. The People's Liberation Space Army has approximately 13,000 troops on the Moon, with reinforcements on the way, according to a press release by the Chinese State Council. Sector 4 is currently occupied by SpaceX Mining Corporation and the U.S. military forces.'
'Sector 4 contains the richest mineral deposits known to exist on the Moon. Its economic value has been estimated at $634 trillion, and its Helium-3 deposits are a critical input of the manufacturing of quantum conductors, which power everything from personal hovercraft, holo-devices, house appliances, toothbrushes, and personal communication devices and consumer electronics.'
'The United Nations has appealed to both countries to try to keep diplomatic channels open, but both governments have so far ignored its resolutions. In a press conference at the New White House in Princeton, NJ, President Bill Gates III said all options remained on the table. When pressed about whether these options included the deployment of Cordium weapons and neutron bombs against Chinese lunar forces or military operations in the Earth Theater of Operations, President Gates declined to answer.'
If China goes to the moon to mine heavy metals - the international community can either get together and sanction China (they won't) - or accept that China's doing it.
If the US does it - the same thing will happen.
I can't really imagine anyone else doing it - but then they have a little less global importance and smaller guns - so maybe there would be sanctions to stop it.
One would almost have to achieve global importance and big guns before moon mining is within reach. Russia would be more likely than China probably given their level of spacefaring ability right?
It gets almost no press but China has a very active space industry and is quickly advancing its space technology. Russia's space technology has not advanced much since the 1960's. China has built its own space station in the last few years, did a moon sample return recently (first rocks back from the moon since the 1970's), and has companies working on making re-usable rockets.
Russia's space fairing capability has been holding steady (if not declining). China has been making steady progress at expanding capability. But either way, no one is any where near economically viable lunar mining.
This is the kind of thinking that yields DDT, PFAS, Mao's sparrow famine, dying coral reefs, etc.
Natural systems are extremely complex and intertwined in ways that cannot be comprehended in the slightest. The nearsightedness and expediency of the modern engineer is criminal and should be met with the highest level of justice, his ideations with caution and skepticism.
What's disturbing is that skepticism is taboo. The move fast, break things, disrupt everything ethos is considered noble and desirable. Skeptics are "negative" and "holding us back". They're luddite deplorables who want us to remain in the stone age.
We are living with unprecedented abundance. We don't need to take desperate and risky actions because we are not living in desperate times. We don't need to mine the moon. We need to slow down, take stock, and reap what we've already sown.
Sorry, what "natural system" exactly are you talking about? The moon doesn't have one in the sense you mean.
I notice a lot of people operate on the unexamined assumption that there's life everywhere. This is a decent assumption for the Earth. It does not hold in space. There is no "environment" to mess up on the moon. It is already a radiation hellscape with no air, no water, and no life. It can't be turned into an ecological disaster, it already is one, of a scope beyond anything you can find on Earth. If you literally dumped a million tons of the worst radioactive waste on the moon, it would would not noticeably affect its characteristics.
If you value the ecosystems of Earth, get as much industry off of it as possible, into places where there is no "environment" to mess up.
>Sorry, what "natural system" exactly are you talking about? The moon doesn't have one in the sense you mean
Whether the moon and the earth are part of a natural or unnatural system is irrelevant, so we can omit the word natural for the purposes of this argument.
The moon and its interactions with the earth are part of a system. Some parts of the system are understood. For example, the moon's effect on the earth's tides.
Mao's sparrows were part of a system. Changing this variable, the sparrow population, impacted one variable that impacted another variable, that impacted another variable. Dead sparrows --> more pests --> less grain --> famine.
We can try to predict and speculate all we want, but the only way to know how a system is affected by a variable change is to change the variable and observe the effects. And it can take a very long time before effects reveal themselves, and sometimes they cannot be easily reversed.
When introducing an unprecedented change to a system, all we have is uncertainty, so before we introduce that change, it's important to proceed very slowly, and with caution.
I dunno, I'd say its effect on earth's tide is a pretty "natural system". Seems odd you can assert such certainty of not having unintended consequences and miss that
According to Google, the moon's mass is 8.1 x 10^19 tons. According to some random info I found, we mined about 3 x 10^9 tons of metal ore in 2019. If we did that on the moon for a thousand years and brought it all back to earth, that's still 7 orders of magnitude less than the moon's mass, so what is that, 1 ten millionth? Is that significant? Well, the earth apparently gains 4 x 10^4 tons every year from just sucking up space dust, and presumably has been for the entire 4.5 x 10^9 years the moon has been around without obvious issues, so it seems like our moving a bit more mass between them wouldn't do much.
It would take in the order of 10^6 years to reduce the mass of the Moon by 0.01% if we mined at the rate at which we mine(example: iron) on Earth.
Having said that, it is not about altering the mass of the moon. It is not even about deorbiting. Both of which are enormously difficult to fuck up by our puny efforts. It would also have very little effect on rotational speed or gravitational field.
But that’s not the point. At all. What is the cost of mining the moon/space mining? What is this metal that we are going to mine at astronomical costs that is alleged to magically make all our lives better and ‘save the oceans’.
I couldn’t find that information the article. I think someone simply wants grant money to build a bigger house or fund their children’s college fund. This duck isn’t flying..not walking..not even limping it’s way to the moon to mine anything.
But tides aside, which we kind of understand, and you may be correct about in regards to mass and mining, what other effects does this system have that we don't understand? The unknown unknowns are the important things to consider here.
Did people who started burning coal all those years ago ever think they'd have to worry about climate shift driving their descendants from their homes centuries later because of their actions? Did anyone ever consider that the mass use of disposable plastics would cause these chemicals to persist in our bodies, our water, our food supply? Did any of these people proceed slowly and with caution out of consideration of unknown unknowns?
There's a certain line you need to draw when considering unknown unknowns. You're suggesting that changing surface features on a remote body in space could somehow affect Earth. Consider that the moon has been hit by very large asteroids in the past which caused disruption on a scale beyond what we could ever do and we don't have any indication that it has affected the Earth other than kicking up some meteor showers. Worrying that we could somehow provoke something more is akin to worrying that driving to the grocery store will trigger an ecological collapse. We have no reason to think it will, we can't even posit something that sounds plausible, but there could be unknown unknowns that make it so.
How about the supply chain that would move equipment and labor to and from the moon? How about the debris this would leave behind around both bodies? How long can this be done before the Earth's environment is affected? Will our descendants stop drilling when problems begin? Will they still continue long after the damage has become visible?
Do you have any idea how many problems were created by good intentions?
The amount of mass you'd need to move for that to happen is... well... astronomical. Besides, that's easily offset by sending things back to the moon for recycling/dumping.
You're blaming your straw man for "nearsightedness and expediency", yet it took you 0 rational arguments to come to a conclusion about the correct outcome.
I also have no idea where you come up with this taboo against skepticism. Read the comments on any HN article about a new technology and you'll find skeptics front and center. It's certainly alive and well in engineering.
I agree with you that natural systems are more complex than we can accurately model. We should work on those models.
I work in research, and collaborate with two main teams. One does environmental monitoring and modelling. The other works in extraction (mining) and chemical processing. Guess which one of those collaborations covers my salary? I love working with the environmental team but if that was the only income I'd have to leave a long time ago. If you want engineers to slow down and smell the roses, you'll find most would love to. You'd better have a way to support them though, because if they can't pay for their house while doing it you won't have many takers.
>Guess which one of those collaborations covers my salary? I love working with the environmental team but if that was the only income I'd have to leave a long time ago. If you want engineers to slow down and smell the roses, you'll find most would love to. You'd better have a way to support them though, because if they can't pay for their house while doing it you won't have many takers.[…]
This is a terribly shortsighted view. Environment is what supports us.
When sea levels rise because humanity as a whole has made a series of short sighted decisions with disastrous consequences, our little houses would have helped nail the final mail on coffin of humanity.
It's not a view, it's a fact. Most environmental projects don't have a budget to support more than a couple people. If you'd like that to be different, yeah, me too. Complaining doesn't change it though, which is why I ask for ideas instead of self-righteous doomsaying.
Humans have 10 fingers. We desire to wear a hundred rings.
It’s not ‘self righteous doomsaying’ to point out we are consuming our planet to extinction and looking for other places to stuff the maw of our human needs.
The solution is to reduce world human population to carrying capacity. As a super apex predator, we need the environment and habitat to survive.
If we polish off resources meant for ecosystems that need to exist to feed us, what we are doing is akin to slicing our fingers for soup because we ran out of carrots.
Want less and no more than you can afford. That’s the idea.
I'm pretty sure mining a empty rock from thousands of km away of 0.000000001 of its mass is less risky than mining the same thing in our backyard. Zero risk is impossible, but we know the risk of doing the things we do right now.
So unless you are willing to give up on the things that allow you to post this very comment on HN, the the building materials most come from somewhere. Better it come from the moon that the amazonia.
The option of not mining at all exist, but the chances that it happen are so low betting on it would be like hoping to win the lottery to pay for your hospital bill.
Mining the moon in and of itself? There's no impact on Earth. Introducing tons of extraterrestrial metals into our biosphere? There's the rub.
The article totally disregards the lifecycle of consumer products that would use lunar metals. There's already a massive challenge dealing with historic heavy metal pollution across the globe.
Recycling is a hard problem. Not because of the technical aspects. Because a massive chunk of what we consume never ends up being recycled in a safe, secure environmental conscious manner in the first place. Just consider how much e-waste ends up in 3rd world scrapyards. There are massive economical and political hurdles to consider. Our collective behaviors need to fundamentally shift...
... and once you start thinking about that, you automatically arrive at the 5 R's which have a distinct ordering: Reduce, Reuse, Repair, Rot, Recycle.
If we could figure out how to reduce global consumption of resources in the first place in order to stem the rate at which our planet gets polluted... then what's left of the need to scavenge metals from other heavenly bodies?
> If we could figure out how to reduce global consumption of resources in the first place
The most obvious solution there is to build things to last longer. But in the current environment, companies ate strongly incentivised to do the opposite.
>If we could figure out how to reduce global consumption of resources in the first place in order to stem the rate at which our planet gets polluted... [..]
It’s easy. Reduce population to carrying capacity. The math is 1/2 surviving child per human that’s a non transferable right for 150 years.(Altho at this point, it may be too late. I would like all of us to survive past 2030, but worth a shot even though the decline of our eco system began in 2000ish)
It would be better if we found a way to preserve genetic material or find a way to generate pluripotent cells for procreation. We would need diversity of genetic material and not everyone would want to be a parent. Their genetic material would ensure that we have a ‘genetic library’ of reference materials so we don’t go extinct as a species.
The moon is a very very very large dead rock. No amount of mining by humans will effect its mass, orbit or effect on tides by any measurable amount. We would literally have to mine more each day than has been mined by all of human history and then do it for thousands of years for there to be even the tiniest measurable impact on earth's ecosystems.
There are actual economic and environmental concerns with moon mining (e.g. launch/recover pollution, high costs, etc). But the sorts of concerns you linked to are not them.
This argument isn't like that whatsoever because the Moon isn't teeming with life.
In what way would mining the moon be destroying it? It would possibly destroy our view of the Moon from Earth, but at the level of mining that we're talking about the mass of the Moon would be relatively unchanged. We're not talking about deconstructing the Moon here.
If you are concerned about us deconstructing a solar body, we could always use the Moon to springboard to the asteroid belt, where we could easily deconstruct bodies and return the valuable resources to Earth without affecting the delicate Moon-Earth system in anyway.
The moon has a mass of 7×10^22 kg. How will wildlife on earth be affected if we mine a billionth of a billionth of a percent of its mass from the side that is never visible?
The idea is to develop a a self-sufficient industry on the moon so that you can do in-situ production of the manufacturing capacity and have it highly automated or teleoperated from Earth to minimize the number of people travelling to and from.
If it's done right you can produce pretty much everything except for semiconductors directly on the moon.
According to weforum, "the world consumes 100.6 billion tonnes of materials annually."[0] 100.6 * 10^9 tonnes is 1.00610^14 kg.
According to Wikipedia, the mass of the moon is 7.342×10^22 kg.
If we switched our entire mining infrastructure to the moon tomorrow, including stuff like sand and gravel for construction (which would be pretty crazy) it would take us 7.298 10^8 years to consume the entire mass of the moon.
It would take us 7.298 * 10^6 years to consume %1 of the moon. 7.3 million years to reduce the mass of the moon by 1% and increase the mass of the Earth some trifling percent that I don't feel like calculating right now, but you get the point.
Long story short, mining the moon at our current rates of mining would do nothing to sea life, or life in general on Earth, while mining on Earth has and continues to do immeasurable damage to life on Earth.
In what way does the moon effect the earth _other_ than its gravitational pull? Do you think that industrial mining on the moon would have a noticeable effect on the gravitational pull of the moon?
Reflected light. The environmental concerns of lunar mining would be dominated by the effects of massively scaling up the space industry on Earth. Distantly behind that would be the potential for changing how reflective the moon is.
Changing the gravitational pull is just beyond consideration. You'll be able to take a train to the moon before that's a problem.
Yes it seems like if we are able to destroy the moon, then we will be able to do a lot else fairly efficiently (asteroid capture and mining, for example), and moon mining will be something we choose not to do for preservation's sake.
This is a non argument, because the moon is just a lump of gravitating matter. Those effects you mention are independent of what happens on the moon. The moon might as well be coated with swiss cheese and nothing would change (... as long as the cheese has similar albedo to the moon as it is now)
The normal argument I see against this is that it's easier to mine nearby asteroids. You can reach them without needing to deal with another gravity well -- both landing your mining equipment and launching the mined material again are expensive and potentially risky.
Getting things down is obviously far less of a problem than getting things up.
The hope is a long run situation where industrial activity is self sufficient enough up there that less stuff has to go up. And most things are just coming down into the gravity well. That's the only way it could ever be economical, or ecologically sensible.
But I'm pretty pessimistic about our ability to execute to get there from here.
I think the problem with getting things down will be political.
Any entity capable of precisely delivering enough mass to survive reentry from lunar orbit is now in possession of a weapon of mass destruction, equivalent to a small nuke.
In the late 50s, the U.S. Air Force considered deploying "rods from God," essentially tungsten telephone pole satellites that could hit silos or other hardened targets at near-orbital velocity. Since they weren't inherently explosive, they skirted the Outer Space Treaty. Ultimately they were considered too provocative to deploy.
Imagine a man-made asteroid with several times that mass, coming in from lunar orbit. I'd guess about 10x the energy of a tungsten rod in low orbit, if it wasn't aerobraked or what not. No state which lacks the capability would be happy about it!
Heinlein explored this in The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress. Anyone with the ability to "violently land" small asteroids and/or large rocks on Earth with location precision will have enormous political power.
Plugging some numbers into wolfram alpha, a 90,000 kg object (about 12 cubic meters of iron, for example) moving at the reentry velocity we'd expect from lunar orbit (10 km/s) would have about the equivalent kinetic energy of a 1kT nuke, which is quite small.
You'd have to lob a really big rock at those speeds to get to the megaton range. (Or from interstellar distances, since energy scales with v^2.) Seems infeasible for a near-future lunar mining op. But it also demonstrates how powerful nuclear weapons are.
It all depends on how fast it can be pushed by the mass driver, but the weapon would need to ingest ~4e+15 Joules to impart a megaton of energy into something.
I wonder if there wouldn't be a point where the impactor would be squashed enough to fuse some tritium, but, then, it's no longer just a kinetic weapon.
I mean, that is already the case for anyone who can launch a satellite. So US, Russia, China, the EU, Iran, India, Israel, both Koreas and Japan. Which helpfully are the only people who could mine in space. So I don't think this is really a limit...
Yes, and in practice dropping such a death rock would be viewed the same as using a nuclear (or mass chemical) weapon, and the response from nuclear powers, etc. would be commensurate.
>Trained as an MIT engineer and NASA geophysicist, with an international law degree to boot, Pinault is a partner at Airbus Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm focused on planetary challenges.
> early-stage venture capital firm focused on planetary challenges.
Maybe, the ones pushing Helium-3 mining on Moon despite completely obvious challenges (extremely low concentration that no one ever does in terms of mining, fusion being prerequisite, plus it's on the moon) also know something about the moon, space, Helium3 but that didn't stop half the public from buying the BS.
It's like suggesting us commute by fighter jets. Can it be done for a demo? Sure, but the whole concept is total fiction that relys on the publics ignorance on the subject to propagate.
Show me the numbers that say producing the fuel and the equipment to mine and transport the ore to produce 200,000 tons of rare earths a year from the moon to the earth is less damaging to the ecosystem than ocean floor mining would be. As my mother would say, the math ain't mathin'.
That's taken care of already. World population is going to peak sometime this century and there's nothing on the horizon that will bring humanity back to replacement rate fertility. The environment will be fine, and energy demand will decline along with population.
Good ideas, but not good enough. Recycling almost doesn't work at current technology levels and costs. Unless you come with proper nanobots that would pick all those tiny thin pieces/layers of heavy metals and bad substances in all electronics for example.
This kind of naivety is pretty dangerous from my point of view. Good intentions, but completely unrealistic in expecting to actually fix an ultra massive and complex problem, makes people reject scientific discussion and dig deeper for better understanding and just say things that makes them feel good and move on.
Ie why not make more efficient cars - gee I wonder why nobody thought about that. I guess EU is regulating cars to hell killing whole product lines just for the heck of it. And its not enough, very far from it.
We need to attack problem from all possible sides, and mining in places which can't be technically more polluted and can't harm anything alive is probably the most ecological thing apart from killing whole mankind or forcing it all back to the caves. And we should do more, much more. Like keep educating people, starting from schools, its not a rocket science. Subsidize and tax.
Also, Mars is about humankind survival, it has been discussed here ad nausea. Who doesn't understand we need to diversify our location or mankind will 100% eventually die is again... dangerously naive.
1. GP meant how individuals get SUVs and trucks to drive themselves around, not to carry freight.
2. More train use instead of trucks is generally a good idea; not sure about landfills though, since you would have to disassemble the train line to them after they're cleared. Might still be worth it though.
1: As opposed to the steep gravity well of the moon which requires multi km/s chemical propulsion to land, for asteroids you can do a lot with much more efficient chemical propulsion and only a small kick with chemical propulsion.
‘To Save The Deep Ocean’ and the planet, we should reduce population to carrying capacity.
Everytime I read something about ‘mining’ space for our frivolous needs, I think of the first paragraph of Seveneves by Neal Stephenson.
Of course, the Moon isn’t going to shatter because we mine with our puny little implements, but the hubris of mankind’s stupid greed is something that symbolizes destruction and I abhor it with all my heart.
Ok. So we mine space. What about air and water and other non renewable resources that we can never mine for anywhere else.
The population quadrapled from 1900 to 2000. It’s too much and too fast. It’s entirely unsustainable and unbalanced. Global warming and raising sea levels is going to be an ugly reality we will be face in our lifetime. You know what else will go under water..rocket launch sites. Just sayin’..
I've got a really dumb question, wouldn't large scale mining and transport of resources from earth to the moon slow down the earths rotation due to added mass?
Not a dumb question at all. Interestingly enough, the moon is already slowing down the Earth's rotation, and it has been doing so for billions of years. Through tidal forces, the moon's orbit is gradually being raised at the expense of the Earth's rotation being gradually slowed. Right now, the same side of the moon always faces the Earth. In the far future, the same side of the Earth would always face the same side of the moon. The day would be much longer and the moon would be much farther away. However this would take about 50 billion years, which is a lot longer than the solar system has left in its current balance.
The amount of mass humans would extract from the moon through mining would not change this in any appreciable way because the moon is just too massive.
We've managed to moderately fuck up the extremely thin layer of gunk that clings to the surface. Not to diminish the magnitude of that “achievement”, but meaningfully the orbital parameters of the moon is another thing entirely.
I'm not a physicist, but I'd say the mass of the moon slows down the rotation of the earth, so moving the mass from the moon to the earth would make it spin faster (or at least, slow down less).
Iff the energy can be extracted on the moon (water + solar + rock) and equipment be built there, there is only the gravity of the moon to overcome, which is low.
* The moon is frequently bombarded by rocks of different sizes (most of this stuff burns up in our atmosphere). Any permanent structure needs to essentially survive being shot at by something at between mach 10-50[1], maybe just a tiny spec of dust, a pellet, or something big as a truck, happens every once in a while on the moon with no advance warning (except during meteor storms, when it's more like the battle of Somme). This probably rules out using permanent installations like catapults/mass drivers, space elevators, or similar to escape the planet.
* You still need to actually land the stuff on earth. Can't just hurl space rocks at the planet. Anything big enough to survive re-entry is going to make a big crater.
* You need to bring the stuff needed to safely bring stuff back to earth up into space for every "shipment". This is probably more costly than launching the stuff from the moon.
Given how much flak WW2 bombers could take and still fly, I'm not overly worried. Just build redundancy into the design. For wheeled vehicles, add more wheels. For solar panels, put them in a grid spacing, etc.
Since the moon has a vacuum, whatever is launched from there has no drag. Make the payload in winged form, skip-bounce on the Earth atmosphere, add some ablative shielding, and Bob's your uncle.
This is a bit different from flak. The intuition you have for kinetic energy based on living on earth doesn't capture just how insanely high the kinetic energy of something going at 70 km/s is. It's probably better to conceptualize it as heavy artillery than a projectile in terms of the damage its capable of inflicting.
Sure, but it will also go straight trought many things, not impart all of its kinetic energy into whatever it punches through first. The ISS has survived quite a long time in much the same environmental conditions as stuff on the moon offer, and the ISS also needs to worry about keeping air inside.
Just how dense are these rock showers do you reckon? After all, the moon has very old untouched features.
The ISS can first of all move if something larger is detected. But the ISS has gotten hit, several times. But most of its cross sectional area is solar panels though so it's not been so bad.
Another big difference is that if the ISS gets hit by anything with significant kinetic energy, it will just punch a hole clean through whatever it impacts. There is nothing that can absorb that sort of kinetic energy. This is in most scenarios good news.
If a meteorite hits the lunar surface, the surface absorbs the kinetic energy, the surface and the meteorite evaporates, causing an explosion of molten rock moving at high velocities. This means even glancing hits or near misses can be devastating in a way they aren't when you are in orbit.
Due to the lower gravity Lunar Space Elevator with existing technology[0] to greatly simplify the process of resource return and we could easily use Moon based solar power to mine and refine minerals.
I question whether all of the efforts that it will take to set up and operate mining operations on the moon (not to mention the political implications and conflicts) are any less destructive in the long run than harvesting metals from the ocean bed.
People are attracted to mining the deep sea because there are seabed nodules and crusts that are enriched in valuable metals like cobalt, nickel, manganese, and copper:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manganese_nodule
"Those of greatest economic interest contain manganese (27–30 wt. %), nickel (1.25–1.5 wt. %), copper (1–1.4 wt. %) and cobalt (0.2–0.25 wt. %)."
A nodule containing 1% copper and 1% cobalt is a great ore.
These nodules are not found on the moon. As far as we know, no cobalt ore bodies of comparable richness are found on the moon. Transition metal ore bodies on Earth have been formed by Earth's geochemistry, including its hydrological cycle. The Moon does not have liquid water and its minerals are undifferentiated silicates.
Undifferentiated silicates are abundant on Earth. Trying to mine them is an exercise in getting $1 of metal from $10 of energy and chemicals. Trying to mine undifferentiated silicates on the Moon means getting $1 of metal from $10 of energy and chemicals plus $10,000 in transportation costs.