Move Kiruna to the moon

The moon has moved significantly closer this week, in our consciousness. Artemis II is the best news in a long time and the lunar mission felt about as long as a trip to Thailand.

When the moon is a stone's throw away, mining and other things that threaten the environment on Earth become increasingly controversial.

Aluminium, silicon, iron and titanium are bound in large quantities in the Moon's surface. Gravity is one-sixth of Earth's. The energy cost of moving material follows.

The Artemis astronauts are on their way home. Slightly smug in their reports. I think they sound a bit like entrepreneurs who have been on a retreat and become high on the idea that “we are all one”. I suppose they might have that.

I am thinking about Kiruna. Thinking about when I stopped there by train on my way home from Tromsø. When the SJ train staff had gone on strike.

The winters are dark for four months. The temperature drops to minus thirty or more. LKAB mines iron ore a thousand metres down into the rock. They are already using autonomous robots, just like we will have on the Moon. Their remote-controlled vehicles and advanced processing methods already have something alien about them. It all feels like preparation for something much bigger.

Just over forty kilometres from LKAB's head office lies Esrange Space Center, one of Europe's most active space facilities. No other place in Europe has that combination.

Everything feels predestined, yet also delayed. Considering what Apollo did in the sixties and seventies, we should have come further. Kiruna's mining operations should have been moved to the moon instead of moving the city and instead of polluting the Earth.

What about transport, then? Space transports better than the Norrland inland and the Bothnian Sea. On a rail like Santa and the reindeer. It starts as a rail track on the moon's surface, like a maglev train but faster. You accelerate the package and launch it towards Earth. It enters the Earth's atmosphere with a heat shield made of moon rock if you like. With a remote-controlled parachute, the delivery is shipped to a suitable depot.

No boulders. Everything has already been processed in robot factories on the moon.

A new economy is to be built up there. More Swedish companies should follow and participate in building the infrastructure from station to station.

Kiruna needs to move again. The mining operations are making the ground unstable. Two cities have already been moved. They know how it works.

Perhaps it is time to think about where the next move should go, not for Kiruna but for the mining operations.

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