Do the 382kg already brought by the Apollo missions count? Also, please tell me this means 1000kg and not some funny American unit.
@retr0id it's still much less than the 187,400kg we left there. 187,400kg down, 5,972,199,999,999,999,999,812,600kg to go!
@BrunoParga i didnt know we had that much already, and i was using american Ton so 2000 lbs or 907 kg
@strutheo Oh jeez why would you use American tons...
Anyway this will be pretty trivial once Starship is operational.
@HansPeter I'm not a native English speaker, so I'll defer to @strutheo ... he originally phrased it that way so I assume it is correct. Like, a mine doesn't have to be underground, and the line between "mining" and simply "collecting" probably gets blurred in lunar circumstances. (And I suspect at some point they might have done some digging to collect material below the surface?)
@BrunoParga if we count all lunar material already collected, then it includes many instances of Apollo astronauts picking up rocks from the surface that they thought looked scientifically interesting. Not sure that I'd call that "mining", but OP seemed inclined to count it (though they haven't said so explicitly). Personally I'd count it simply because it makes the market very hard and ambiguous to resolve otherwise.