How to Exploit Lunar Resources and Bring them to Earth

A couple of months ago talking with a friend at the gym, a random conversation started and has been occupying my thoughts ever since.

Imagine this situation, you receive the project of exploiting lunar resources and bring them to earth, but there is a problem, you don't have a rocket to send them to the earth. How can we solve this problem?

Yeah, I know it is a pretty weird and random question, but let's think, we definitely will find awesome solutions.

The first solution that came to my mind was throwing them to the Earth. Since the moon and the Earth are kind of linked between them by gravity, I thought we can just throwing them and eventually they will reach the Earth. The only limitation here is we need to throw the resources in a way that they can escape the gravity of the moon, otherwise it will be orbiting around it and we will just polute our orbiting space complicating new missions due space garbage.

Related with the last solution, was dynamiting the resources. If we have no rocket, let's the resources become a rocket. This has its own problem like pollution and we cannot control where the resource will land on the Earth if they are not disintegrated on the atmosphere.

If we consider the last two problems, a lunar trebuchet or a laser propulsion space sail done with a bed sheet and a laser pointer are no better solutions.

Then my friend came with an very interesting idea. If you cannot send the resources from the Moon to the Earth, let's bring the Moon to the Earth. He suggested creating a large rope and tying it to the Moon, so we can get the Moon closer. Considering this is possible, the only problem with this, is that the Moon would explode by the gravity after reaching certain threshold and would become a planetary ring, and probably the Earth would be destroyed by the oceans, winds, and gravity instabilities.

The idea was ridiculous, but it opened my mind. We don't need to be focused on realistic ideas on how to bring resources to the Earth, we can break the mold and devise new solutions beyond our imagination.

Remembering an old city builder videogame, the first thing that came to my mind was creating an space elevator. A large tube that connects the Earth and the moon. Of course rotation is a huge problem, but we just need to connect the closer space of the two systems, we don't need to connect them to the ground. We just send them, it is received by the tube, and at the other side a collector receives the resources and bring them to the Earth.

Creating a tube with those dimensions is complicated and expensive, but it was the seed of new ideas, because who said we needed a tube? We can just play baseball with the resources, creating a pitcher of resources and a catcher in the Earth's side that after receiving the resources send them to the Earth in a controlled way.

All right, the last solution is great, but between Earth and Moon there is almost 300,000 Km, so we need to control how the resources will travel this space without losing the trajectory. Creating a tube again would be the solution, but we can do it better.

At the University during a heavy rain I was watching a drainage from the ceiling to the ground, but it was not a tube, it was a chain draining. This gave me an idea, what about putting pretty small asteroids in the trajectory of the resources? This way the resources receive gravitational assistance every certain time preventing them to move out from the trajectory!

The best thing with this approach is we can play with the gravitational assistance to achieve incredible speeds and enhanced control, reducing the responsibilities of the pitcher and catcher.

There are problems, I know it is not a perfect solution, but I will continue thinking about this problem, ideating crazy solutions that probably will never be executed.

It's fun resolving this kind of problems that seem to have no solution, it is a idea generator, a mold breaker that I use to train myself to solve real world problems. I hope you like it and if you have any other random problem you want to solve, put it on the comments, I will be glad to ideating great solutions!

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