[Firadeoclus]

Certainly, getting those elements in larger quantities will be important, but by the time we have the cargo capacity to build colonies on the moon it seems likely that someone would be very happy to trade, say, 100t of Earth-sourced C/N/H for 100t of Moon-mined Au, shipping included.

[kspacewalk2]

Which will of course tank the price of Au into the oblivion, since it is mostly speculative.

[slashdev]

I don’t expect there to be much in the way of heavy elements on the moon. It’s mostly made of lighter stuff that got blasted off in the collision with earth when the moon was formed.

[Retric]

The surface has been slowly bombarded long after the moons creation. So surface mining could have a very different elemental mix than subsurface mining.

~48.5 tons of material hits the earth’s atmosphere per day. The moons smaller, but suck impacts where likely more common in the past * 4 billion years and you’re talking a few feet of such material across the entire surface. https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/asteroids-comets-and-meteors/me...

[csomar]

But shipping from the moon to the earth should be much cheaper? I don't have the math (so someone please do?) but based on the size of the Apollo 11, it seems to be trivial to send stuff to earth.