Problems And Anomalies Associated With Real Estate And Business: Fill & Download for Free

Corporate Real Estate executives no more look at their portfolio from a mere cost-cutting perspective - they realize the importance of an integrated approach as their portfolio builds on and the complexities associated in managing it.1. Get together - The first step, hence, in formulating a working and sustainable RE strategy is - "Get in a war room with all your warriors" viz. the management executives, Finance, HR, Operations et al.2. Look where you stand – You may not go forward until you know where you stand currently. Take inputs from everyone, listen to the problems and ideas from their perspective - find current utilization, anticipated growth, employees' preference, transport data, current occupancy costs and so on. Discover opportunities and partner with an established Real Estate Consulting firm to formulate strategy to tackle all/most of these problems. In all of this, do not forget to think from your most important customer’s perspective – your own employees, who buy a firm's idea and vision and provide their blood and sweat to deliver them for you!3. Uncover opportunities - Use market and competition bench-marking studies to figure out where you currently stand. Technology & experts can help at this stage to uncover anomalies in occupancy costs across your portfolio (another reason why you should switch from desktop/excel based portfolio analysis to a centralized view on integrated software systems that talk to your firm's ERP systems). If you are still storing those old leases in file cabinets- go digital right now and save some space and manage your portfolio digitally rightaway!4. Looking beyond "transactions" - Though the tactical aspects of your real estate activities would never cease to be important, there is a time when every firm realizes the ad-hoc nature of their various leases/agreements spread across geographies and the need for greater transparency, insights and actionable strategy for the entire "portfolio". It is no more about just lease renewals, acquisitions or dispositions - it is beyond that. It is about a direct impact on the growth of business, time and work-efficiency, employee acquisition, engagement and retention, performance edge over competition, compliance with the ever changing laws et al.5. Lease or Buy- this is not a debatable question. It is a driven by what kind of business or situation a firm is in. Knowing to ask the right questions to yourself will automatically, most of the times, clarify which way to go.

If you flip a coin, what are the odds you will get tails? You’d probably immediately answer that it is 1/2, or 50%.But this question is more loaded than you think.It involves the motivation behind the law of large numbers, a theorem that illustrates the results of an experiment repeated a large amount of times. Specifically, the average of the results of something like a coin flip, for instance, will tend to be close to the expected value, or 1/2, over a large amount of trials.It guarantees that the average value, as more trials are performed, will only get closer to the expected value.We know further that the central limit theorem specifies if we conducted several identically similar random samples of coin flipping, for large sample size values and for a given number of samples, we would eventually get the sample average.We would converge to 1/2.But why am I telling you this on a question about investing?It reveals the nature in which statistics are often bent and skewed to lure people.Let me flip that same coin only 10 times.It might be very possible I get 10 heads.It might be very possible I get 5 heads and 5 tails.It might be very possible I get something other than 1/2 heads or 1/2 tails.What we actually know nothing about are the full answers to the limiting behavior of our statistics in question. We have a guarantee for some kind of convergence, but the general problem for limiting behavior is not fully solved.Precisely, what exactly are we saying when we say you have a 1/2 chance for tails or heads?Because, when the coin is flipping, we say there is a chance for either. When the coin has flipped, we now have a 100% chance of either one or the other.In its best case, statistics is a weird field with some minor clarity issues on definitions. Probably because of our own limitations as human beings.At its worst, I’m not sure I could finish the list here.Remember this weirdness. We’re going to come back to it.For now, let’s move on.Part 1I’m not going to sell you anything. I’ll go over things that people can launch off of themselves—some of the answers might be things I’m working on myself.A lot of answers on this thread that are popular are selling you something.There is a funny twist to investing. Many conflate what it means, so it is often blanketed for things that aren’t investments.This conflation is often intentional. You see the shiny lights on the “I have made X amount of money doing this”, so you are gravitated towards it. You see some sympathetic story about family and how it taught a lesson, so it becomes instantly personal and meaningful. You see fancy words about compounding or magical transformations, so you keep clicking through the advertisement and go to the person’s website.But it’s a silly, yet powerful, acknowledgement. In fact, it’s better in the form of a brilliant question:“Why would anyone who makes a lot of money using ‘secret’ or ‘hidden’ information help so many others out of charity?”If you scroll through some of the answers here, you’ll start to become aware of the sales tactics. You’ll realize the notion of “pay me first, then get the secrets”.You’ll notice the “put your money in this cryptocurrency” strategy.We could run through a thought experiment where this happens. Let’s just say that I have this amazing cryptocurrency, Verge, and I am telling everyone I possibly can about its ingenius capabilities.It has transformative powers, never-before seen technology, security unlike any currency that came before it.I start to run ads for it and talk about it all over Quora. I tell you to invest in it. I use my hundreds of thousands of followers to help themselves. I tell them that they’ll change their lives.My advertisements catch more people who are looking for desperate ways to make money.What is once trading for pennies now is undergoing an invisible process naked to the observant eye.For me, and my 5 buddies own almost 95% of the currency bits. Every time 1 Verge coin is being bid on, I tell my pals not to let them go until it hits some value 50% higher than the previous.They sell, then I tell them to hold. The average weight of the higher bids now pushes the price of Verge up.I tell them to wait for all the bid demands to go up a similar proportional amount. I instruct them not to sell until it hits that threshold. When the bids get near it again, they sell a little more.We keep doing this at a faster and faster frequency. The person with the most leftover coin that didn’t actually sell any is me.And what do I do when all my buddies run out of coin?I sell mine in waves.Let’s look at this crypto, Verge. While I don’t have direct evidence that this was a fraudulent coin, we should take a look and decide for ourselves.March 23, 2017: Priced at .00000003 dollars. That’s seven 0s, in case you were wondering.Market cap of $393,641. That is what all the Verge coins added up are worth.December 23, 2017: Priced at .269137 dollars.That’s a market cap of $3,893,076,609. That’s 4 billion dollars.In case you are very curious, as I am, that is a 990,505% increase.Your original investment in this coin would have been worth about 10,100 times what it was originally worth.Meaning, if you had $10,000 in March, you would have had $101,781,000 by December of the same year.Sounds like a wise investment if you ask me.But it isn’t you making that money. The entire thing is predicated off the mathematical notion of a zero-sum game. For me to gain, you must lose. Or, for me to gain, you must gain a lot less than me, and somebody else must lose. Somebody is always losing. In this case, hundreds of thousands probably lost. Exactly how much?Probably about all of it. And at varying amounts.It’s worth $.004 today. It isn’t quite as worthless as it used to be. It isn’t quite the 27 cents it was at one point. I don’t hear many people shouting that cryptocurrencies are going to be the earth-shattering revolution they were going to be.I like Bitcoin. I think Bitcoin probably has a future in our society. It’s been around for over a decade and it hasn’t gone away. I own some myself.But things like this are not only silly, they’re fraudulent. People should go to prison, and I haven’t heard anything about finding what actually happened. I have heard stories about 51% mining attacks, a lot of which was unclear.I might even conclude it could have been a smokescreen.Either way, nearly a million percent increase on what you owned in less than a year is an insane amount to walk away with. Clean and clear.That’s nearly 4 billion dollars somebody transferred from the masses into the hands of a very few.If you’d like a visual of this investment, look no further:Part 2Housebuying.Or; house-leveraging for renting.I actually wrote a whole piece on how housebuying or leveraging can be an awful financial decision.I won’t go into every little detail, but I’ll ask you an extension of the cryptocurrency ordeal:If every single person is buying the same vehicle to invest in, and they’re doing it at massive debt, what does that start to look like after a while?What begins to happen if there is a slight correction to the prices of homes? Will you still be able to take a loss on your investment for a short while and collect lower rent while prices recover over the next decade? What if your tenants are late on their rent, or worse, they leave and you can’t find anybody to fill your rental property for half a year?What happens if there is something that is massive to fix that you don’t currently have the cash for?What if the interest deduction isn’t nearly as big as you thought it was going to be at the end of the tax year, and you don’t know how to pay the tax man the remaining balance?Homes are like any other investment vehicle in this world. They’re volatile. Especially when they’re being integrated with modern day technology to be traded like any other equity on the market. With the growth of the instant-buying culture, comes major problems.In fact, the biggest problem is probably your real estate agent.There is always a reason to buy a house, and there is always a reason to sell it. There are always reasons for either, and those reasons contradict each other depending on the season you are in. Real estate agents exist for the purpose of transacting, they’re not economists or accurate predictors of financial times. If they could do that, they wouldn’t be in the business of buying a house or selling one for you—they’d just do it themselves and get rich.Investing in homes isn’t an impossibility. It’s just far exaggerated in the world of real estate, and anywhere somebody is making a percentage commission off you, you should practice caution.But houses are something more than other investments.They need management.Warren Buffet in 2012 said:"If I had a way to buy a couple hundred thousand single family homes and have a way of managing them, I would load up on them. I would take mortgages at very low rates… It is a very attractive asset class… If I was an investor who was a handy type, which I am not, I would buy a couple of them at distressed prices and find renters and again take a 30-year mortgage, it is a leveraged way to own a cheap asset. I think that is probably as attractive as an investment you can make."But Warren Buffet never solved that management problem. Mostly because the leveraged way to get an asset, like a single family house, is not meant for billionaires. It’s meant for the average family to own a piece of land and call it home. The people who manage the home are usually called family.And it is a home first, and everything else a distant second.The S&P national index for U.S. home prices shows that we have just recently returned to the pre-recession prices. This recovery took over a decade.Even with homes continuing to go up, studies show that the bottom 90% of the socio-economic ladder is worth less now than 25 years ago. Stated another way, the rich are actually getting richer. That is, even if you adding equity into your home, even if your net worth is technically increasing, the top 10% are increasing at a rate faster than you, at all points in time present and future.The ability to climb the ladder at the same pace as your parents doesn’t matter so much anymore.In fact, millionaires and billionaires are related to the next point. Well, maybe not billionaires exactly, but the power of the amount of money—and not so much anything else.Part 3The magic of compounding.It’s not really magic.In 1683, Jacob Bernoulli wanted to figure out what happened when $1 pays 100 percent interest per year. He looked at what happened if that interest was credited once, and he arrived at exactly $2.Naturally, he wanted to partition that interest into as many splices as possible, at 100 percent interest, over one year.When he chopped up the compounding into once a month, at the end of the year he got $2.613035.When he compounded 52 times, or weekly, he got $2.692597.When he did it once a day, he got $2.714567.Eventually, he got [math]e[/math]: 2.71828182845904523536028747135266249775724709369995.But the point isn’t to show you the power of compounding at all.The important things to note here are how close compounding monthly and compounding an infinite number of times are.Another essential thing is this rate of 100% per year.But the most important thing to note is the amount you started with.Bernoulli asked this question:An account starts with $1.00 and pays 100 percent interest per year. If the interest is credited once, at the end of the year, the value of the account at year-end will be $2.00. What happens if the interest is computed and credited more frequently during the year?But he was being one part scientist and one part academic.Imagine if he didn’t start at $1, but he started at $1,000.Or, imagine starting at $10,000.Or, imagine starting at $100,000.What if you had $1,000,000?The most important thing about compounding is that the power of infinite compounding isn’t important.It’s the principle amount and the interest rate.Take James Simons Medallion Fund, for instance. He has generated 66% returns over the last 32 years or so.Let’s say, for simplicity’s sake, you are going to have an estimated return on your money of 50%.You’re going to invest for 5 years.We’ll look at daily, monthly, and annual compound frequencies for a variety of principle amounts.If your initial starting amount is $10,000, at a 50% rate of return, at the end of year 5, you will have:If compounded daily: $121,617If compounded monthly: $115,836If compounded annually: $75,938If your initial starting amount is $100,000, at a 50% rate of return, at the end of year 5, you will have:If compounded daily: $1,216,168If compounded monthly: $1,158,352If compounded annually: $759,375If your initial starting amount is $1,000,000, at a 50% rate of return, at the end of year 5, you will have:If compounded daily: $12,161,671If compounded monthly: $11,583,512If compounded annually: $7,593,750Are you noticing a pattern?If I had 10 times more in my initial investment, my end result also ended up being 10 times larger.$1.2 million is a lot more than $121,000. And $12.1 million is a lot more than both of those. Actually, it is equivalent to the sum of every single method of compounding, save the $11,583,512 amount.Proportions matter, whereas looking for the frequency of the compounding doesn’t matter. As you can see, the difference between compounding monthly and daily had very little difference. It was only when you looked at $100,000 and $1,000,000 that you had a difference between annually and monthly compounding that became noticeable.It’s only when you don’t compound or you compound once a year that you start to see some problems.Bernoulli didn’t get to the part of creating massive profits through leverage. But James Simons, the world’s greatest hedge fund manager, punctuated the lemma from his original findings.Since 1988, he has made trading gains north of $100 billion. Today, the total assets for his hedge fund are summed at $110 billion.The more you have, the quicker you can change to the next gear.Part 4Gambler’s fallacy.Remember when I said we’ll use the coin-flipping example above later?The gambler’s fallacy is exactly that example.Specifically, the incorrect use of that statistical nuance.You’ll read about how people have earned a bunch of money and then lost it all only to earn it back again.These people are not geniuses. They’re gamblers. They’re not investors. They’re not gurus.There is no such thing as a guru.Run away when you hear the word.Wikipedia defines the gamblers fallacy “as the Monte Carlo fallacy or the fallacy of the maturity of chances, is the mistaken belief that if something happens more frequently than normal during a given period, it will happen less frequently in the future (or vice versa). In situations where the outcome being observed is truly random and consists of independent trials of a random process, this belief is false. The fallacy can arise in many situations, but is most strongly associated with gambling, where it is common among players.”We should pay attention to the words “the mistaken belief that if something happens more frequently than normal during a given period, it will happen less frequently in the future.”In the opening, I went over that probability, or advanced coin-flipping, has an addendum.Specifically, if we are flipping a coin, we are saying much more than the odds of heads or tails being 1/2.Something is omitted from the probability. We don’t write the part that, as we flip the coin many, many times, the law of averages tells us that we get a large amount of tails and a large amount of heads. Even though the literal difference between the number of heads and the number of tails never reaches 0, we use this result to illustrate the law of large numbers. We then use that result to yield the central limit theorem, where we conclude that given enough identically independent random variables—that is, a sequence of samples of coin flips of large amount, we will converge upon an anticipated value that will give us the distribution for our expected value, which in this case would be 1/2.It’s a mouthful, so we say it is 1/2.This is a simulation of a coin that is red on one side and blue on the other. When the coin is flipped, the dot represents the side the coin flipped on. It illustrates the law of averages and the law of large numbers, and how the proportion eventually reaches about 50/50.But the interesting thing to note about each trial run simulated is the amount of partitions you can make on the flips.In reality, nobody is going to flip a coin thousands and thousands of times. You will never truly realize the 50/50 nature of coin flipping over long periods of time.What we often realize, however, are the anomalies in the study of probability.If you focused on the moments where only blue dots are piling up or only red dots are piling up, that’s the interesting part. The gambler’s fallacy tells us that if we get 10 consecutive blue flips in a row, we have no reason to believe that we are more likely to get a red flip. The flipping of the coin each time is independent of the last. We will always say that there is a 1/2 chance of a red flip.I like to call what I’m motivating the reverse gambler’s fallacy. The issue with the gambler’s fallacy is that they focus on what hasn’t happened. Sometimes in Las Vegas you’ll walk across a roulette table and you’ll see the screen of all red numbers or all black numbers (I know that there are also two green numbers, but for the sake of the discussion we will talk black or red). Even though you see 15 black numbers consecutively, you are yearning to put your money down on red.But you’d be silly.You want to know in what fashion you can predict the statistical nature of all those red or black numbers to begin with. You want to know more about the behavior of that probability for that sliver of time.You actually only want to be playing for those consecutive black or consecutive red numbers.To create an analog to the stock market, you want to figure out where the concavity or convexity is about to happen for your equities.You want to figure out when the stock price will change at an increasing pace before that actually happens and you want to figure out when the price will increase at a decreasing pace before it actually happens. These would be the ideal points of entrance or exit.These are really the layman’s questions that people want answers to (among many, many others). Figuring out when a stock is far too beaten up or when a stock is far too high is oftentimes nonsense. This is because your 52 week high could be next year’s 52 week low. And this year’s 52 week low might be next year’s 52 week high.Things could either be getting far better or far worse.People make money doing this.In fact, searching for some simple answers to the behavior of specific portions of the stock market has been a great source of profit for James Simons. His fund is almost fully comprised of money from all of his employees, and every year they make tens of billions of dollars figuring out answers to small, but insightful, questions. He’s been making money consistently while beating the S&P index. For over 31 years. If you look at almost every single hedge fund to date, most under perform the S&P index.In fact, after even one year, 64.5% of funds under perform.After 10, that number becomes 85.1%.After 15 years, it’s 91.6%.If you look at the marijuana industry right now, you’d look at periods where short-sellers are either getting absolutely killed or they’ve gained about a billion dollars in capital so far in the year.Believing in either would probably give you an even chance of losing your money.That’s insane. Talk about thinking that your result or your luck is somehow going to turn around. It’s as if you are watching the gambler’s fallacy, live.The only reason people like Simons don’t get any media coverage is because the media does not know about him and he does not care to advertise. He doesn’t need to advertise. The day-trading gurus all around the internet need to advertise for a simple reason:When you can’t be successful, you try to sell your services as success.In other words, if you can’t gamble your way to the top, you sell your failed tools to others for a premium.The best information out there is in the form of questions that haven’t been asked yet.Turns out that the best questions often lead to the best investments.Part 5Diversification is the key.If diversification is the key to anything, I’ll be shocked.This is severely misunderstood, mainly because it is told by people who can’t explain why diversification is good.If you look at the funds in the last portion of this answer, you’ll see why.Diversification is also an ephemeral thing.People often look at stock indices and think that something is financially healthy or unhealthy.We look at the Dow Jones or the S&P, and we see it go up, and we think, “The total stock market is looking good!”But there is a caveat to this.From 1963 to the end of 2017, the S&P 500 index has had 1,259 components replaced. On average, each year, there are 23 companies swapped, changed, or modified.Similarly, changes happen to the Dow Jones Industrial Average, too.And it leads to the question:What exactly are we tracking?or perhaps:Is what we are tracking relevant from year to year?I would argue that it is not.They’re bad measures of the total market because the total market just does not matter.The people who actually make money in the market trade in the things that they know and they stick to it. You can look up a lot of the holdings of some very famous traders—minus their options positions, which they are not obligated to show those. You’d see that there is a pattern to the way that these people trade, and it doesn’t necessarily reflect what any indices show.Furthermore, they’re usually the complete opposite of diversified.They’re concentrated portfolios. They’re heavily concentrated portfolios.Similar to the real estate example, diversification is usually a tool a money manager gives to lure in customers. Their primary motivation is making a percentage on what they are ‘investing’ for you, and making money for you is eitheran accidenta general consequence of every single stock going upnon-existentAgain, as in the portion with housing, anytime commissions are involved, proceed with great caution.If you look at Simons, you’ll see that their primary motivation is to make a lot of money. It turns out that the money in their fund is provided by all the employees. They work together, and their work stems from high level complex mathematics.And it isn’t diversified.If I can make one addendum that’ll bring together all these parts, I would say that the point of investing is to put money in your pocket. But the way to do that is by figuring out the changes that aren’t anticipated.The theme of each part was to illustrate that figuring out which questions to ask is what makes investing essential. I didn’t want to actually tell you what to do, but I wanted to give you a way to eitherstart thinking about the right questionsstart thinking about why I might be wrongBecause whether we are talking about Euler’s number, the power of compounding, leveraging a loan for a house, gambler’s fallacy, or probability, it is essential to always dig for nuance.There is always a question deep inside a concept that either isn’t being challenged or isn’t being asked.Some people know that, and instead of figuring out the questions to ask themselves, they exploit the concepts for meager profit. In a landscape where everybody wants to find out how to invest, exploitation naturally runs rampant.Otherwise, doing what every single person is doing won’t tell you what you need to know about investing. In fact, even I probably can’t tell you. I’ll be figuring it out alongside all of you who read this.Consider this a starting point.I didn’t use too many specific references, but I’ll link as many sources as I believe are relevant:RenTech’s Billion-Dollar Tax Cloud Darkens After IRS RulingGambler's fallacyUnited States S&P Case-Shiller Home Price IndexCentral limit theoremLaw of large numbersRenaissance TechnologiesActive fund managers trail the S&P 500 for the ninth year in a row in triumph for indexingHedge funds lose money in 2018 but outperform S&P 500 by a whiskerThe Real Reason Active Managers Underperform The S&P 500 IndexThe Myth Of Compounding InterestCompound Interest-The Real Wealth KillerCannabis stock short-sellers made almost $1 billion in 2019Pot Stock Short Sellers Are Getting Killed. That Means the Marijuana Rally Could Continue.

Yes it is feasible. There’s a long way from it being feasible in principle and an actual business, but plenty of possibilities to explore.The main suggestions include volatiles from the poles - supplying water and the water split into hydrogen and oxygen as fuel, to LEO - where the Moon has the advantage that export is much easier than from Earth, precious metals for export to Earth such as platinum, which may be there as a result of impacts of iron rich meteorites and giant asteroids, and many resources suggested that could be used in situ on the Moon. We could also create solar panels on the Moon. It’s useful for fabricating electronics because of the hard vacuum. There are some processes you can do on the Moon easily which would be hard to do on Earth because it is so difficult to get a sufficiently hard vacuum to do them.There are several books by Moon enthusiasts describing this in detail, how it would work. Paul Spudis is one, with his most recent book, The Value of the Moon: How to Explore, Live, and Prosper in Space Using the Moon's Resources. Another is Dennis Wingo, CEO of Skycorp, and author of Moonrush, see his recent paper, and appearance on the Space Show. Others include Madhu Thangavelu, David Schrunk, and other authors and contributors to The Moon: Resources, Future Development and Settlement. See also David Schrunk's paper Planet Moon Philosophy , and their appearance on The Space Show.I did a summary of some of the main resources on the Moon for my Case for Moon first. The rest of this answer consists of extracts from the section The Moon is resource rich from my kindle book.VOLATILE RESOURCESWe have pretty good evidence now of ice at the poles, in permanently shadowed craters, thought to be relatively pure and at least a couple of meters thick according to radar data from a NASA instrument flying on India's Chandrayaan-1 lunar orbiter.It's not a direct detection however, so there is still room for scepticism about it, as rough material would have the same radar signature as radar transparent ice. But craters that are rough when new, are rough both inside and outside the crater rim. While these signatures are found only inside the craters and not outside the rims, which they interpret as meaning that they are caused by ice. The temperatures are also right for ice.If it is ice, it could be "fluffy ice"."We do not know the physical characteristics of this ice—solid, dense ice, or “fairy castle”—snow-like ice would have similar radar properties. In possible support of the latter, the low radar albedo and lower than typical CPR values for nonanomalous terrain near the polar craters are 0.2–0.3, somewhat lower than normal for the nonpolar highlands terrain of the Moon and are suggesting the presence of a low density, “fluffy” surface."(page 13 of Evidence for water ice on the moon: Results for anomalous polar)In either case, it is not just a little ice; if this is what they detected, there's estimated to be at least 600 million metric tons of this, and possibly much more.It also contains other volatiles. We know for sure that there is some ice on the Moon, by the LCROSS impact experiment. Relative to H2O at 100% they found H2S at 16.75%, NH3 at 6.03% SO2 at 3.19%, C2H4 at 3.12%, CO2 at 2.17%.So, if the rest of the ice at the poles has a similar constitution to the impact site that's a lot of nitrogen (in the ammonia) and CO2on the Moon at the poles.On the other hand, caution is needed as this is not direct detection. The LEND results (searching for hydrogen through reduced emissions of neutrons of a particular type) are particularly puzzling, as there is almost no resemblance between their map and the miniSAR map.LEND map - in this picture blue is reduced neutron emission and shows likely locations of hydrogen. 0 degrees longitude is at the top.They did detect hydrogen, but puzzlingly, it was not correlated with the permanently shadowed regions - there was some hydrogen in permanently shadowed regions, and some also in illuminated regions. A recent paper suggests that ice mixed in the regolith in illuminated regions may be ancient ice that survived a minor shift of the lunar axis.According to one hypothesis, this may be ancient deposits from over three billion years ago before volcanic activity, which changed the polar axis slightly by shifting material.A new LEND mission has been proposed involving low passes over the poles at altitudes as low as a few kilometers, for higher resolution results.The Moon may also have ice at lower latitudes too, as there are permanently shaded regions up to 58 degrees from the poles (only 32 degrees from the equator). Though these regions are too warm to have ice on the surface, there may be ice there underground. See Ice may lurk in shadows beyond Moon's poles (Nature, 2012).At any rate, the Moon does seem to have resources of ice at the poles (though memorably, Patrick Moore in one of the last Sky at Night programs that he did said that he'd believe there is ice at the poles when someone brought him a glass of water from the Moon). More research is needed to find out how much there is and where it is.METALSCritics often say that the Moon is undifferentiated and doesn't have any processes to concentrate ores. Although the Moon doesn't have any liquid water so all the processes involving concentration of resources through water erosion won't work, it still has many processes that can concentrate ores. Including:Fractional crystallization - as a melt cools down, some minerals crystallize out at a higher temperature than others so form first. They then settle or float, so remove the chemical components that make them up from the mix, so changing its formula, leading to new crystals to form in a sequence.Gravitational settling, lower mass material floats to the top.Volcanic outgassing can concentrate materials such as iron, sulfur, chlorine, zinc, cadmium, gold, silver and lead.The processes that lead to volatiles condensing at the poles - which it seems can also concentrate silver tooProcesses unique to the Moon (perhaps electrostatic dust levitation may concentrate materials)?Volatiles brought in as part of the solar windAsteroid and micrometeorite impacts bring materials from asteroids to the lunar surface such as iron and possibly platinum group metals etc.The Moon has many valuable ores for metals. For instance, the highland regions (probably the original crust of th Moon) consists mainly of Anorthite (a form of feldspar, formula CaAl2Si2O8) which is 20% Aluminium, compared with 25% Aluminium for Bauxite on Earth. So aluminium ores are abundant on the Moon, indeed orders of magnitude more abundant than they are in typical asteroids, but it does require a lot of energy to extract the aluminium from the ore. Either a nuclear power plant or large areas of solar panels. Crawford, in his "Lunar Resources: a Review", says this about aluminium on the Moon:"Aluminium (Al) is another potentially useful metal, with a concentration in lunar highland regoliths (typically10-18 wt%) that is orders of magnitude higher than occurs in likely asteroidal sources (i.e. ~1 wt% in carbonaceous and ordinary chondtites, and <0.01 wt% in iron meteorites; . It follows that, as for Ti, the Moon may become the preferred source for Al in cis-lunar space. Extraction of Al will require breaking down anorthitic plagioclase (CaAl2Si2O8), which is ubiquitous in the lunar highlands, but this will be energy intensive (e.g. via magma electrolysis or carbothermal reduction; Alternative, possibly less energy intensive, processes include the fluoridation process proposed by Landis , acid digestion of regolith to produce pure oxides followed by reduction of Al2O3 (Duke et al.), or a variant of the molten salt electrochemical process described by Schwandt et al."Mining this for the aluminium would create calcium as a byproduct, which is useful as a conductor in vacuum conditions, a better conductor than copper weight for weight -you need half the mass for the same amount of electricity. (Copper does better than calcium on a per volume basis because it is 5.8 times denser, it is also of course much more practical in an atmosphere because calcium reacts vigorously with air, but that's not a problem for conductors that operate in a lunar vacuum, and in space applications the reduced mass may be an advantage)."Calcium metal is not used as a conductor on Earth simply because calcium burns spontaneously when it comes in contact with oxygen (much like the pure magnesium metal in camera flashbulbs). But in vacuum environments in space, calcium becomes attractive."Calcium is a better electrical conductor than both aluminum and copper. Calcium's conductivity also holds up better against heating. A couple of figures mining engineer David Kuck pulled out of the scientific literature: "At [20C, 68F], calcium will conduct 16.7% more electricity than aluminum, and at [100C, 212F] it will conduct 21.6% more electricity through one centimeter length and one gram mass of the respective metal." Compared to copper, calcium will conduct two and a half times as much electricity at 20C, 68F, and 297% as much at 100C, 212F."Like copper, calcium metal is easy to work with. It is easily shaped and molded, machined, extruded into wire, pressed, and hammered."As would be expected of a highland element, calcium is lightweight, roughly half the density of aluminum. However, calcium is not a good construction material because it is not strong. Calcium also sublimes (evaporates) slowly in vacuum, so it may be necessary to coat calcium parts to prevent the calcium from slowly coating other important surfaces like mirrors. In fact, calcium is sometimes used to deoxidize some metal surfaces. Calcium doesn't melt until 845C (1553F)."Utilization of lunar materials will see the introduction of industrial applications of calcium metal in space."From the section on Mining the Moon in Permanent - by Mark Evan Prado, a physicist in the Washington, D.C., region working for the Pentagon in advanced planning in the space program.The Moon is deficient in copper, at least on the basis of what is known so far, but as well as calcium, aluminium is a good conductor.The LCROSS experiment found silver (a superb conductor) and mercury at the impact site, but the concentration is not known, except that it is far higher than the levels in the Apollo samples, and is probably in a layer below the surface, as the signal was delayed. See LCROSS mission may have struck silver on the moon.It has abundant iron - in addition to ores (which would need a lot of power to extract), it actually has free iron metalFrom meteorite impactsNanometer sized "blebs" released from the rock by the hydrogen in the solar wind reacting with iron oxidesParticles of iron concentrated from the source materials for the regolith.It's in powder form already, and naturally alloyed with nickel and cobalt. The blebs, or "nanophase iron" are found inside impact glass particles, so would be hard to extract. The rest though is made up of tiny particles of pure iron, so the obvious thing to try to do is to separate them out using powerful magnets. They are rather small though, most are less than a micron in diameter which could be a challenge. If we can separate them out, we can get five kilograms of iron, 300 grams of nickel and about half a gram of platinum, gold etc. (platinum group metals) in every cubic meter of regolith - as pure metal what's more. (This summarizes part of section 5, Metals from Crawford)He bases that on a paper from 1980 by Morris and particularly its conclusion, which uses a model to interpret the data. Taylor and Meeks in the section Agglutinitic Glass versus Grain Size and Maturity (page 133) in their paper suggest that perhaps most of the iron is in nanophase form, mixed up with the glass and hard to extract.However we don't need to speculate any more as Jayashree Sridhar et al of the NASA Johnson Space Center have done the experiment using actual samples of lunar regolith. See Extraction of meteoritic metals from lunar regolith, and they succeeded! The nanophase iron was a problem but they were able to work around it by varying the experimental setup. By varying on the size of particle they ground it down to, the strength of the magnets and details of the technique they could extract over 80% of the meteoritic iron in some of the tests. They conclude:"Experimental results indicate promise for the extraction of meteoritic metals from lunar regolith. However, more work is needed to refine the technique and understand more about the variables that affected our results."The iron is valuable for steel, and is also a conductor, though not nearly as good as Aluminium or Calcium. It would be useful for some applications such as electric railroads on Mars, and is a conductor easy to access in the early stages.Also nickel and iron are useful for making nickel / iron batteries. These could be useful for making batteries on the Moon with in situ resources, for instance to help last through the lunar night."Iron-nickel batteries are very rugged. Their lifetimes which can exceed 20 years are not affected by heat, cold or deep cycling. They are not easily damaged by rapid discharging or over-charging. On the downside, they have poor performance at low temperatures but they can be kept warm with insulation (e.g. simple regolith) and thermal wadis. Also, they only have a charge to discharge efficiency of 65% and will self discharge at the rate of 20% to 40% per month. Despite these shortcomings, they might be the Moon-made power storage systems of choice due to their simplicity and the availability of their component materials on the Moon. Moreover, these materials are among the easiest of materials to produce on the Moon."See Electrical Energy Storage Using Only Lunar Materials.Then, you also have titanium. This is especially interesting as it is rare in asteroids. Apollo 17 samples are 20% high purity Ilmenite, a Titanium ore which is found in the lunar mare. And better than that, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, with its spectral mapping of the Moon, discovered deposits that are up to 10% titanium, more than ten times higher than titanium ores on Earth. (Phys.org report, NASA image). Titanium is an industrially desirable metal, stronger per unit weight than Aluminium (though it is a poor conductor).Titanium is also widely used in medicine for hip replacements, dental implants, etc., as "one of the few metals human bone can grow around firmly", see also this new titanium / gold alloy four times tougher than titaniumTitanium is especially useful for medical applications because itForms an inert and stable titanium oxide layer spontaneouslyHas a high strength to weight ratioDoesn't leach into blood and other aqueous environments because of its low rate of ion formationIs one of the few materials that can integrate directly into living bone tissues (osseointegration) without any soft tissue layers in betweenCrawford writes (page 17):"Therefore, in the context of a future space economy, the Moon may have a significant advantage over asteroids as a source of Ti. The fact that oxygen is also produced as a result of Ti production from ilmenite could make combined Ti/O2 production one of the more economically attractive future industries on the Moon.For more on this, see major lunar minerals. And for an in depth study, read Crawford's review.So, yes, there are plenty of metals on the Moon, but it might take a lot of power to extract them, apart from the iron, if that can be separated out using magnets.And that's mainly based on the Apollo results which explored a small region of the lunar surface which has been found to be in some ways unrepresentative. The Moon may have many other surprises in store. Many ores on Earth would not be detected from orbit, and it seems the Moon has a fairly complex geology as well.As an example of one way the Moon could surprise us - Earth is often hit by iron meteorites, so the Moon should be also. The main question is, how Dennis Wingo has hypothesized in his Moonrush book, that the Moon may also have valuable platinum group metals which could be mined, the result of the impacts of these iron meteorites.Taking this further, there's a hypothesis by Wieczorek et al that magnetic anomalies on the Moon around the south pole Aitken basin may be from the remains of the metal core of a large 110 km diameter differentiated asteroid that hit the Moon to form the basin. If so, they could be useful sources for platinum, gold, etc.From Wieczorek et al, the North and South poles are marked N and S. Notice the magnetic anomalies clustered around part of the rim of the South Pole Aitken Basin. This is thought to be the result of an impact by a 110 km diameter asteroid. Wieczorek et al hypothesize that the magnetic anomalies trace out the remains of the metal core of this asteroid. If so these could be rich ores, including iron, nickel, also platinum and other platinum group metals (gold, rhodium etc). See page 16 of Crawford's Lunar Resources: A ReviewPlatinum is a particularly useful metal. It is heavy, soft, malleable as gold and silver, easy to draw into wires, very unreactive, and has a high melting point. Out of gold, silver, platinum and copper, platinum is the densest and the hardest and the least reactive (the others are somewhat better in terms of electrical and thermal conductivity, and malleability, but it's not too bad at those either). So, it's not just useful for catalytic converters, fuel cells, dental fillings and jewelry. We'd probably use it a fair bit in other ways too if it didn't cost so much.The platinum group metals might be valuable enough to return to Earth from the Moon, just as suggested for the asteroids, especially if there is water to split and use as fuel available on the Moon or once they set up a mass driver on the MooOf course, you can't just take the current market value of platinum, multiply by the amount of platinum available in a large meteorite - or on the Moon if Wingo and Wieczorek et al are right - and conclude that you'd get trillions of dollars by returning all that platinum to Earth and selling it here. You need to fulfill a need or eventually nobody will buy it. If it's just to replace copper, for instance, in wires, it wouldn't be worth returning unless you could reduce the transport cost back to Earth right down. Dennis Wingo suggested in Moonrush that it could be worth exporting it to Earth for use for fuel cells, as an application that could be high value and yet need a lot of platinum.The gold could be useful too, on the Moon at least. You don't normally think of gold as more decorative than useful but it is used a fair bit in electronics Also combined with the abundant titanium on the Moon you get Ti3Au, an alloy with 70% less wear, four times the hardness and increased biocompatibility compared with pure titanium (and twice as hard as titanium / silver and titanium copper alloys). It's also 70% less wear than titanium, lower friction and four times harder with a hardness of 800 HV in the Vickers hardness test. Density about the same as steel.(density of titanium: 4.43 g/cc. using the atomic masses of gold and titanium, multiplying by (196.96657+3*47.867)/(4*47.867)*4.43 = 7.88 approx. By comparison, density of steel is 7.75 g / cc).The paper focuses on its medical applications, you can alloy titanium with copper or silver, which are twice as hard as pure titanium, but this is four times as hard. It's also 70% more resistant to wear which will make it last longer and lead to less debris. And has excellent biocompatibility properties. But I wonder if it might also have lunar applications, with the hardness especially and resistance to wear.Probably only the platinum group metals would be worth returning to Earth, since it's going to be easier to mine the Near Earth Asteroids, especially the ones that consist almost entirely of pure metal. However, whether or not they are useful for Earth, they are well worth using on the lunar surface once you have industry there.The Moon has some advantages over Mars indeed for metals, such as the pure nanophase iron mixed in with the regolith, which can only exist in oxidized form on Mars except for rare metal meteorites. Also, it's unlikely it will be commercially worthwhile to return metals from Mars while there are definite possibilities of returning metals from the Moon. See Exporting materials from the Moon for future suggested low cost methods for export from the Moon. For discussion of whether anything physical could be worth the expense of export from Mars, see Commercial value for MarsLUNAR GLASSThis is a beneficial side effect of all the micrometeorite impacts on the Moon (which you don't get so much on Mars with its thin atmosphere, just enough to filter out micrometeorites). The Moon's "soil" or regolith contains large quantities of glass, created during the impacts. It also has free iron, as we saw, at half of one percent of the soil, in tiny micro beads of iron (nanophase iron) which concentrate the microwave energy. Again, you don't have this on Mars.As a result, it is really fast to melt the regolith using microwaves. It took only 30 seconds to melt small lunar sample at 250 watts (typical of a domestic microwave). You can melt the soil to glass as easily as you can boil water using the microwave in your kitchen. See lunar lawnmower. This only works with genuine lunar soil and not the simulants. We have nothing analogous to lunar soil on Earth, as Larry Taylor, principle author of this paper found: Microwave Sintering of Lunar Soil: Properties, Theory, and Practice. He says the microstructure of the genuine lunar regolith, with nanophase iron beads scattered throughout, would be almost impossible to simulate.His idea (see Products from Microwave Processing of Lunar Soil on page 194 of the paper) is to run a "lunar lawnmower" over the soil with two rows of magnetrons (such as generate microwaves in a microwave cooker). The first row would sinter it to a depth of half a meter using microwaves. Then the second row completely melts the top 3-5 cm of the soil, which then crystallizes to glass. As it does this, it will heat up and release most of the solar wind particles notably hydrogen, helium, carbon and nitrogen. So it could also capture these assets as it goes along, including the Helium 3, if this turns out to be of economic value.See also The Lunar Dust Problem: From Liability to Asset. This could also be useful, for instance, for a solar panel paving robot to make solar panels, and other applications.Then, there's Behrokh Khoshnevis' idea for making a landing pad on the Moon using tiles made of lunar glass in situ. The idea is to make the surface into lots of tiles by injecting a material that can't be sintered easily using microwaves into the soil first to outline the edges of the tiles, then use microwaves to melt the soil in between.This would make a tiled flat surface for supply vessels to land on. It would also help with the problem of lunar dust by removing dust from the landing area. You can read the details here. He used lunar regolith simulant, so presumably by Larry Taylor's results, it would work even better with genuine lunar samples.SOLAR CELLS FROM LUNAR MATERIALS - SOLAR PANEL PAVING ROBOTOnce you have glass, it might not be such a big step to make photovoltaic cells on the Moon. And here the Moon has one big advantage, the high grade vacuum so you could use vacuum deposition to make the cells in situ. To start with you'd make the cells themselves from materials sent from Earth, later on mine them on the Moon.This is a report from the Center for Advanced Materials at the University of Houston, suggesting the possibility of an autonomous solar powered lunar photovoltaic cell production roverIt would use silicon extracted from lunar materials to make the cells themselves. Of the various methods you could use, magma electrolysis may be best. He uses low efficiency silicon cells which are vacuum deposited on glass, something that is not easy to do on Earth but would be possible in the ultra high vacuum conditions on the Moon. Techy details of this suggestion are here.It would require transporting a small mass to the Moon in the form of the rover which then over several years of driving could build a 1 MW facility on the Moon.sIdea for a robot to drive over the surface of the Moon leaving solar panels in its wake wherever it goes, using only indigenous lunar materials to make the panels. The panels would be only 1% efficient, but given that there is no shortage of real estate on the Moon, that might not matter. It might be more important to make the panels in situ without any imports from Earth than to make them highly efficientStructure of the panelsFor making glass on the Moon see the section above: Lunar glassBASALT (LIKE GLASS FIBER)The basalt itself is a natural resource. If reasonably pure and consistent in composition, it's ideal for making basalt fibre, which is like glass wool, but much better in some ways. The regolith consists mainly of powdered basalt. So might well be ideal for making basalt fibre. See:Basalt Fiber PropertiesHELIUM 3I should mention this, since the topic is brought up so often in discussions of lunar settlement. However I don't see this as a major plus point for the Moon at present.The Moon is a source for helium 3, deposited in the regolith by the solar wind, and some say that helium 3 will be of value for fusion power in the future because it is not radioactive and doesn't produce radioactive waste products. If so, small amounts of helium 3 from the Moon could be worth a lot on Earth and be a useful commodity to export. Apollo 17's Harrison Schmidt is a keen advocate of helium 3 mining on at a reasonable rate at a reasonable rate the Moon.However, we don't yet have fusion power plants at all, and one able to use helium 3 is a tougher challenge. Frank Close wrote an article in 2007 describing this idea as "moonshine" saying it wouldn't work anyway. Frank Close says that in a deuterium - helium 3 tokamak, at normal temperatures for a tokamak, the deuterium helium 3 reaction proceeds so slowly that the deuterium would instead fuse with itself producing tritium and then fuse with the tritium (the original article is here, but it's behind a paywall). For a critical discussion see also the Space Review article The helium-3 incantationSee also Mining the Moon by Mark Williams Pontin. If you can use much higher temperatures, six times the temperature at the centre of the sun by some calculations, the helium 3 will fuse at a reasonable rate, but these are temperatures way beyond what is practical in a tokamak at present. The reason such high temperatures are needed for a tokamak is because the plasma is in thermal equilibrium and has a maxwellian distribution which means that to achieve a few particles at very high temperatures you have to heat up a lot of particles to lower temperatures to fill up the maxwellian distribution so that just a few will react. This is potentially feasible for the lower temperatures of DT but not feasible for the higher temperatures of 3He 3He.However if you use electrostatic confinement, a bit like a spherical cathode ray tube with the fusion happening at the center where the negatively charged "virtual cathode" is, then the particles are all at the same high energy and the result is much more feasible with lower power requirements. This is the approach of Gerald Kulcinsky who achieves helium 3 fusion in a reactor 10 cm in diameter. However though it does produce power, it produces only one milliwatt of power for each kW of power input so is a long way from break even at present.Gerald Kulcinski who has developed a small demonstration electrostatic 3He 3He reactor 10 cm in diameter. It is far from break-even at present, producing 1 milliwatt of power output for each kilowatt of input. See A fascinating hour with Gerald KulcinskiPerhaps this line of development will come to something. Perhaps one way or another we will achieve helium 3 fusion as the enthusiasts for helium 3 mining on the Moon hope. However it is early days yet, and we can't yet depend on this based on a future technology that doesn't exist yet.However even if we do achieve helium 3 fusion, it might not be such a game changer for the lunar economy as you might think. Crawford says (page 25) that to supply all of our energy from Helium 3 would mean mining 5000 square kilometers a year on the Moon, which seems ambitious (and would mean the whole Moon would only last 200 years). So, even if we develop Helium 3 based fusion, and it turns out to be a valuable export, it's probably not going to be a major part of the energy mix.Even more telling, he also calculates that covering a given area of the Moon with solar panels would generate as much energy in 7 years as you'd get from extracting all the Helium 3 from that region to a depth of three meters.Also - there are many other ideas being developed for nuclear fusion, such as laser fusion, and the polywell which has the same advantage that no significant radiation is produced when it uses fusion of boron and hydrogen. I think it is far too soon to know whether or not the helium 3 on the Moon will be an asset in the future when we achieve nuclear fusion power. For a summary, see ESA: Helium-3 mining on the lunar surface.This doesn't mean that there is no point in helium 3 mining however. As Crawford suggests (page 26), Helium 3 is useful for other things, not just for fusion power. It's used for cryogenics, neutron detection, and MRI scanners, amongst other applications, so some Helium 3 from the Moon could be a valuable export right away, even if it doesn't scale up to the huge quantities you'd need for Helium 3 based power generation on Earth. You'd get it automatically as a byproduct while extracting the more abundant volatiles from the solar wind in the regolith, so it might well be a useful side-line to help support lunar manufacturing economically as part of the mix along with everything else.THORIUM AND KREEP (POTASSIUM, PHOSPHORUS AND RARE EARTH ELEMENTS) ,AND SOME URANIUMThe Moon has some uranium, which is a bit of a surprise for such a heavy element, but when bound with oxygen it is rather lighter and can occur in the lunar crust as on Earth. It is especially rich in Thorium, in the lunar Mare. This is useful as a fuel for nuclear fission reactors, which have to be designed to burn thorium instead of uranium to use it. It's not likely to be worth returning to Earth as thorium is abundant here. But it could be very useful in space, at some point in the future.Nuclear power stations built on the Moon wouldn't have the same pollution hazards and hazardous waste issues as stations on the Earth. Perhaps this may be a way to power space colonies, and interplanetary ships fueled from the Moon, so avoiding the need to launch nuclear power plants from Earth to orbit.Thorium is a tracer for KREEP - potassium, phosphorus and rare earth elements. Also associated with chlorine, fluorine, sodium, uranium, thorium, and zirconium, so KREEP ores could be sources for all those elements on the Moon.When the Moon cooled down from the original molten state, then olivine and pyroxene crystals form first, and sink to the bottom of the magma ocean (both made of iron and/or magnesium plus silicon and oxygen). Meanwhile anorthite also forms (made of calcium, aluminum, silicon, and oxygen), which is less dense and floats to the top (forming the lunar highlands). Some of the other elements like nickel are able to squeeze into the crystal lattice and get removed at the same time. But the larger elements can't, and are left in liquid state. They are last to solidify and form the KREEP deposits. It forms in between the olivine and pyroxene deep down, and the floating anorthite on top and may have been liquid for a long time.For some reason, not fully understood, then KREEP deposits on the surface of the Moon are concentrated on the near side of the Moon near the Imbrium basin, with a small amount also in a separate concentration on the far side. The Imbrium impactor probably excavated the KREEP deposits on the near side. But it's puzzling that the much larger Aitken basin didn't lead to large deposits on the far side. Perhaps for some reason KREEP is concentrated on the near side of the Moon. For more about this see The Moon is a KREEPy place by the planetary geologist Emily Lakdwalla which I summarized here.The abundances of rare earth elements on the Moon are much less than rare earth ores on Earth, and despite the name, they aren't very rare here on Earth. So it's not likely that they'll be worth returning. However the most concentrated spots - the ones marked white in this figure - haven't been sampled on the surface and the spatial resolution is low, tens of kilometers. So it's possible we'll find more concentrated ores on the Moon.It's a similar situation for uranium and thorium. The abundances on the Moon from this map are too low to count even as a low grade ore on Earth. But with such low resolution, there could be richer ore deposits when we look at it closely. (Here I'm summarizing what Crawford says about lunar KREEP ores in his survey, see section 7, Rare earth elements and following)POSSIBILITY OF USING LUNAR SOLAR POWER FOR EARTHThis is a bit further ahead, but it is worth thinking about, whether solar power for the Moon could actually be useful for Earth also. Some scientists think it could be.The advantage of doing this on the Moon is that you can use indigenous materials to make the solar panels. For a small amount of launch mass to the Moon you could have a rover that travels over the surface leaving solar panels in its wake. See Lunar glass and Solar cells from lunar materials - solar panel paving robot (above)It's easy to see this working to supply power to the Moon, but some have suggested it could also be used to generate power on Earth. So, taking this even further, with a large scale operation of this type, using only 1% of the surface area of the Moon, you could supply 2 kilowatts of continuous power per person to a population of 10 billion on the Earth. See Solar Power via the Moon. More details here.Or, further ahead, maybe this is more interesting as a talking point than a likely near future concept, the Japanese Shingzu corporation has suggested we could build solar panels in a band around the Moon - at the equatorSee Shimizu dream - Lunar Solar Power Generation - Luna Ring.Earth would get solar power only half the day, so they send the power to satellites in orbit around Earth, which then beam it down to the other side of Earth. Of course they need large receivers to collect the power from the Moon, but only 1% of what they'd need to collect it directly from the sun - that could be worth doing if it is significantly easier to make solar panels on the Moon.On the other hand there are ideas to use large thin film solar panels in space or large thin film mirrors to concentrate the light onto solar panels or furnaces, launched from Earth to LEO. So would the lunar solar plants be a major saving compared to those?Another way that the Moon could help the Earth though, with solar power, is to make the solar cells from lunar materials, and then ship them to GEO or lower orbit. The idea of using lunar materials to make solar power satellites goes back at least to the 1970s, see Construction of Satellite Solar Power Stations from Nonterrestrial MaterialsFor more on this see the The Moon is resource rich section of my Case for Moon FirstWhether it is useful off planet depends a lot on how easy it is to export the materials from the Moon, and one of the most promising ways to do that is Hoyt’s cislunar tether system which exploits the Moon’s position as higher in the gravitational well than Earth to basically “roll the goods down hill” from the Moon to Earth through a system of rotating tethers.SeeExporting materials from the MoonBallutes - return of high value resources such as platinum to Earthin my Case For Moon First