"Terry Goodrich" wrote in message . ..
Hi All,

I was just wondering, we have a 10~20 gram stone worth 5 million. Surely
someone could design a robot to go to the moon and pick up 20 kilo of rock
(pebbles, dirt, etc. it probably wouldn't matter). Assuming that the value
of the rocks would decrease in value as much as 90% due to the fact that
they would be on the open market, 20 kilo of rocks could be worth as much as
500 million dollars. One should be able to build and launch a probe for
that much.

Terry



Moonstone feldspars weigh about 3g per cc and could probably be
cut as thin as ten microns, about 30 sections per cc with waste dust.
Thats about a million gemstone sized sellables, out of your 20 kilo of
rock.
If documented with optical and electron microscopes and sold with
a CD that tells the story of its collection and selenological science,
they might go for a thousand dollars a shot, for the first batch.
A billion dollar haul that with the internet, could be certified
the real McCoy, by any jeweler. A small sample vaporized by a laser
and analized by a mass spectrometer, could reveal an age of over four
billion years, if you pick the right rocks. Lead in Uranium oxide
crystals that is turned into something a hundred times more valuable
than gold.
If there were just some way to get that kind of money at the front
end of the enterprise....

Stephen Kearney