Commercial lunar glass beads? Here's a challenge.

[Moe Grills]

   I'm posting this here because? Two years ago, a Swiss watchmaker
made a few  exclusive, expensive wristwatches to commemorate the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11.
  Each wristwatch contained 12 genuine lunar grains/beads.
Think of it! A new definition for a "precious stone" MUST go beyond
terrestrial diamonds, rubies, etc, to include lunar glass beads.

With that in mind, here's my challenge to ANYONE of you interested
in starting up or supporting a commercial spaceflight project to return lunar samples.
I don't care if it's SpaceX, Bigelow, Google, or one of your own efforts.

 Here's the criteria:
1) Develop, fund & send either an unmanned Lunar sample return spacecraft or perhaps a modest (open-cockpit, one-seat) piloted lunar lander
to the lunar surface to recover at least a liter of lunar glass beads
(the beads being anywhere from 1/2 millimeter to one millimeter in diameter); a liter in volume should amount to between one - eight
million such beads; at least 1.8 kilos in mass by my estimate.

2) The raw lunar material can be filtered through two separate filters on the lunar surface, to recover a high concentration of such lunar glass
beads to return to earth.

3) Work out a deal with an expensive (luxury) wrist-watch manufacturer
(Rolex? etc) for them to manufacture (perhaps a million? half a million?)
luxury wrist watches; each such wrist-watch could (conceivably) have anywhere from four to twelve lunar glass beads fitted as jewels in the watch faces.

4) If say 1/2 a million such wrist-watches were manufactured and sold
worldwide for say 2000-3000 dollars apiece; and the lunar beads in each watch face valued at 1000 dollars, per watch; then 500 million dollars worth
of lunar material will have been collected, brought to earth, fitted to luxury watch faces and hopefully return a small or even respectable profit to the investors of such a commercial space project.

5) If the market demand is greater than expected? Simply prepare
another another lunar sample return mission (manned or unmanned)
to return more lunar material.

6) I'll leave you to decide if a modest commercial manned mission to Moon's surface could do the task, profitably; or will it fall to commercial unmanned spacecraft to do the job.

I'm interested to see WHO on this NSF.com forum would be willing to undertake such a project.
     

 

[ChileVerde]

 
4) If say 1/2 a million such wrist-watches were manufactured and sold
worldwide for say 2000-3000 dollars apiece;

I think that's your problem right there. The high price comes with exclusivity and snob appeal. After you've sold the first few thousand, moon-bead watches aren't all that unusual, the appeal drops off, the market saturates, and you'll have to drop the price to sell more. 

Probably there are marketing studies that quantify such matters.

[Moe Grills]

 
4) If say 1/2 a million such wrist-watches were manufactured and sold
worldwide for say 2000-3000 dollars apiece;

I think that's your problem right there. The high price comes with exclusivity and snob appeal. After you've sold the first few thousand, moon-bead watches aren't all that unusual, the appeal drops off, the market saturates, and you'll have to drop the price to sell more. 

  Snobbery? That's beside the point. Business goes to where ever there's a market: to provide goods or services either to the snob, or to the humble.
You don't despise someone who wears an expensive Armani suit do you?

Even putting aside the issue of luxury watches, and thinking of imbedding
lunar glass beads in gold jewellery.
I think there would be a romantic appeal to women.
Think of a well known gem for example.
To a male unmarried chemist, a diamond maybe simply carbon; to a woman in love, a diamond is romantic.

I don't know of too many women who don't think of the Moon in
romantic terms; I think it would it even apply to very precious/expensive
items from the Moon.
  If the Apollo 11 mission cost at least 200 million dollars in 1969 currency,
and brought back roughly fifty Ibs of lunar material, simple division shows that one troy ounce of Apollo 11 material is worth over 200 times its weight in Gold, even with Gold at 1500 dollars an ounce. 

[dninness]

Back when I was but a kid, before the Shuttle made its first flight and the dream of "$1000/lb to orbit for Joe Six Pack" was still alive, I designed a spacecraft/lander that would take one guy to the moon and back to recover all the Hassablad cameras that I had read were abandoned by the Apollo missions on the moon.

My dad was a professional photographer who shot mostly Pentax gear at the time, and my buddy's dad was a pro photographer as well who had a large collection of "very expensive" (to me) Hassablad cameras.

I thought "Well, hell, if they're worth that much here on Earth..." and did some "12 year old kid back of the envelope-style" figuring, then sat down to design a spacecraft that would get there and back in the payload bay of the shuttle..

Never mind how the guy got in it/out of it (not knowing payload processing, I had no clue as to how payloads got into/out of the payload bay then. Hahaha, how foolish I was!)
Never mind how he flew it and its capabilities or lack thereof. (ISP? What the hell is that?  Delta V?  Never heard of it!  Trans-lunar injection?  Uh, yeah, sure, my thingy here can do that, just like Apollo, only better!)
Never mind how much/little consumables could be carried (hint: probably not enough for a whole day inside this thing, let alone a week or more)
Never mind that it looked like a glorified coffin. (uhhh, yeah... Two words: Waste Management. But it had a window!)

I just figured that if I could go from LEO to the moon, land, wander around, collect up all the Hassablads from near the descent stages, and then scoot back to Earth, I could make a enough money to pay for the whole enterprise.

30+ years later, I'm still surprised I came up with something like that. My dad, who in addition to being a photographer was an automotive designer, took one look at my sketches and said "Uh, ooookay kid..."  At least he didn't say "You're @#%&@ crazy, kid!"

But hey, while you're up there collecting glass beads, you wanna grab some slightly-worse-for-wear Hassablads from 12, 14, 15, 16 & 17's landing sites for me? 

[baldusi]

There's elasticity of demand. I highly doubt that there's a market for a million of those beads and still keep such a high price. The particular reason is the expectation that if some commercial entity does it ounce, it could do it an arbitrary number of times. Thus, the "expected future value" would plummet. In other words, if though that there was a potential source of natural diamonds, then you'd expect that in the long term the price would go down. Such expensive item, are usually as much luxury as reserve of value. Just look at the gold. If you think the USD and Euro are going to devalue, it seems logical that most currencies of the world will have to devalue. Thus, you better hold to real things that keep their worth. Art and luxury metals are the ideal items for that. Could you say the same about the beads?
Now, you could think that in eight years it will be the 50th anniversary of the moon landing. There you could make quite a few arrangements with luxury cell phones, watches, cars, suitcase, etc, for "commemorative 50th anniversary editions with actual moon beads". From that optic, you should be able to get 500M or so.