Four teams competed in NASA's Regolith Excavation Challenge this week for a chance to win a prize of $250K. The four teams all attempted unsuccessfully to build a robot that was able to dig 330lbs of regolith in under 30 minutes. Technology Ranch of Pismo Beach did the best with 143 lbs collected in the 30 minute time frame. All other machines broke down before the 30 minutes expired.

Regolith is the "loose heterogeneous material covering solid rock". On the moon this layer of material can be several meters thick.

A nice documentary that lays out NASA's plan to build a space colony and the technology involved in the venture. In the video they cover the development and testing of new space suits, lunar habitats, mining the surface of the moon, extracting water and oxygen from lunar soils, and how the O

Researchers in Australia are using titanium dioxide to split seawater into oxygen and hydrogen gas. The hydrogen gas can then be used to generate electricity. Somehow I find claims such as these amusing the university team was confident it would be able to make the process efficient enough within 10 years for it then to be developed commercially. Although they also say that covering an area of 40 square kilometers with these generators would be enough to produce enough hydrogen for all of Australia's energy needs.

What are you doing June 10-13, 2007? If you are planning on going to Sudbury, Ontario consider yourself lucky. Norcat is hosting the Planetary & Terrestrial Mining Sciences Symposium on those dates. Hopefully they can put together a symposium better than a website. (Why did you hide the link to the homepage, people?) Well, Norcat does claim that Canada has become the world leader in mining and space robotics - they never mention web design.

The purpose of the symposium is to promote a relationship between the mining industries and space agencies.

MSNBC published a neat article outlining what is being done to design habitats for the moon colony. NASA's Constellation Program Office seems to be coordinating the effort.

The main thrust of the lunar habitat projects are inflatable dwellings. The reason for this is that the planned payload of the Orion ships are only 13,000 pounds. Space Station modules, which are apparently the only other option for lunar habitats, weigh up to 30,000 pounds.

Beyond talks with Lockheed and Boeing, NASA is talking with several other private contractors to help design and possibly build these inflatable habitats. One company is Bigelow Aerospace, who has already launched one of their inflatable habitat designs into orbit, and has a second test launch planned for April, 2007. The second company is ILC Dover. They have built a prototype for a NASA funded test in Antarctica.

Wired magazine reports that NASA's moon base project may set off a race to the moon for nuclear fuel. The moon is rich in Helium-3, which can be used to power nuclear fusion reactors. The Fusion Technology Institute headed by Harrison Hagan Schmitt and Gerald Kulcinski have produced a small helium-3 fusion reactor in a basketball sized device. The device continually provided about one milliwatt of power.

This article simply strikes me as very informative about mining operations here on earth. This is simply a background piece...Just ignore it if you aren't interested.

Kingsman Resources Inc. Commences Drilling at Snowshoe Property

VANCOUVER, Dec. 14 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ - Kingsman Resources Inc.
(TSXv: KSM) ("Kingsman") has begun a winter diamond drill program on the
company's Snowshoe property. Drilling will test electromagnetic and
magnetic anomalies resulting from last year's helicopter-borne survey by
Aeroquest Ltd.
Several AeroTEM II conductors were identified by the Aeroquest survey.