Re: Outer Space Treaty?
Call me naive, but exactly *which* minerals are so expensive and useful that it's worth dragging them out of one gravity well and into another, rather than digging them up at home?
Maybe it's worth finding iron asteroids, zone purifying them, and injecting air to blow them into a nice big bubble: either live in 'em or let the air out, plug the gap, and send 'em towards earth: get the volume right and they'd float like huge balloons at the altitude of your choice. Refined metals with all the nasty stuff done where the heat and physical pollutants don't affect this rather fragile planet.
Or get out to Saturn's rings and start lobbing chunks of ice at Mars; a few icebergs a day and you'd soon have an atmosphere worth thinking about breathing.
But commercial minerals on the moon that are valuable on Earth, rather than on the moon? Unlikely, I fear.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
