Growing interest to greatly expand cis-lunar robotic and human activities in space has resulted in a need to find low-cost solutions to meet anticipated near-term and future resource demands (Sanders, 2018, Colaprete et al, 2016, Colaprete et al, 2010, Kornuta et al, 2019). The extraction, production, and sale of local resources from the Lunar surface may have the potential to meet these demands, but only when it is economically viable to do so. Endeavours of this kind, as is also seen in the terrestrial extractive industries, carry substantial financial risk, particularly in the early stages when a project has both significant geological and development uncertainties. It is now becoming critically important, as the space resource industry advances, to develop the right processes and frameworks to evaluate and communicate risk in prospective projects, to encourage investment, and reduce market uncertainty.
CITATION: Casanova, S, Espejel, C, Dempster, A G, Anderson, R C, Caprarelli, G and Saydam, S, 2019. Resource exploration strategies for lunar polar volatiles, in Proceedings Future Mining 2019, pp 173175 (The Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy: Melbourne).