Bringing that much materials and machinery, in order to build permanent processing facilities on the Moon, large enough to process such amount of Lunar soil, is not going to be easy. Some things could be built in place but most of the machines will have to be manufactured on Earth.
Maintaining a human colony on the Moon is also going to be challenging. Growing food there is impossible with sunlight so artificial light sources may be used. Water on the Moon is somewhat hard to get, too. Furthermore, Moon's surface is completely unshielded against space radiation. A fully automatic facility would overcome these issues.
Sending the processed Helium-3 from the Moon to the Earth, with automated containers, is much easier than the other way around. However, 1 ton of Helium has significant volume even when compressed. Transporting it in its liquid form would be next to impossible, I think.
(10-09-2013, 02:20 PM)Krank Wrote: Does anyone else see the dangers in this? Aside from immediate danger to the miners and transporters, I am talking about long term here. The Earth relies on the moon. The gravitational pull and pull back creates the tidal effect in our oceans. If we start removing stuff from the moon, over a period of time it will start to loose mass. The gravitational pull/pull will lessen and the tide will start being affected. The tides directly effect ocean currents which is massive manipulator for the planet's weather systems. In other words, if we take enough material from the moon without replacing it we would be effectively killing our own planet in the process.
Because of the tides we are going to lose the Moon, eventually.
Removing 40 tons of material per year will not affect the Moon in any way worth mentioning.
The Earth is losing about 100 000 tons of atmosphere annually [source].