| Super-short term, or longer term? Moon has a similar crust to earth, has never been mined before in all of human history, and doesn't have an ecology to ruin. But the kicker is that the Delta-V requirements for moon->earth transport are quite modest; even to begin with. [1] Delta-V requirements scale exponentially with gravity. With the inverse, at 1/6 of earth's gravity and effectively no atmosphere, all kinds of exotic transport and launch solutions that would be ludicrous on earth would be rather pedestrian on the moon. So the theoretical lowest possible price for shipping moon->earth would be very low indeed. Assume there's mining/manufacturing on the moon already. Then at some point as people build out infrastructure, there's going to be a threshold point. First one factory might start to be able to build things and ship them to some of the more remote places on earth for cheaper than a similar factory on earth can do. At that point demand would increase and the price would keep dropping as volume increased. Said factory just needs to be very careful to set things up so that at no point in time (past commissioning at least) they need to ship so much as a paper-clip from Earth, because that would immediately crater their budget. [2] So long term moon-earth ROI is pretty good I'd say. Just getting to that particular threshold would be hideously expensive, since it requires a lot of earth launches. Possibly some intermediate steps might be needed. [1] To slightly misrepresent the situation but give an intuition: The Saturn V rocket was needed to get to the moon; but the tiny spaceship-stack at the top of the rocket [LM ascent stage + CM/CSM] was sufficient to get back. [2] Which is not to say that you can't sometimes ship things from Earth. While shipping from Earth is (comparatively) insanely expensive, one-off costs can always be amortized. But you can't practically include earth-launch as an integral part of your on-moon production or shipping processes and still expect to make a profit. This is part of the challenge. |