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Nick Davis reports from Jamaica, which is home to the organisation which controls the new industry.

What are the milestones after you land?Once we prove we can land safely we'll show we can hover over the lunar surface. We may leave a small commemorative payload on the moon and then lift off to lunar orbit. Bringing anything we later mine back from the moon will have three separate, technically challenging elements: getting mined resources into lunar orbit, from there to Earth orbit, and then to Earth's surface. The great thing here is that we don't have to invent anything new to do all this.

build electric motors for a hybrid vehicle platform due in three years

To the extent that a (gasoline) engine is core, these motors will be core

GM opened its own battery pack manufacturing plant last year because it considers that technology, too, to be core to its strategy.

Three types of risk The expert group put together by the Commission has already identified three types of risks: Import risk, where raw materials are imported from a politically instable region or from a country where the market economy does not work. "That is relatively easy to do as the World Bank has put together governance indexes which measure the political and economic stability index of countries," the EU official explained.    Production risk within the EU, with potential problems such as land access. "If we are in a country for example where the population density is very high, where urbanisation is very high, obviously access will be weak," the EU official explained. Environmental risk, based on indicators such as air or soil pollution, where the impact of raw materials use is measured from an environmental point of view. "This is innovative compared to other studies," the EU official said. "We have just launched a life-cycle analysis to determine what the environmental impact is for each raw material in terms of exploitation, use, treatment, recycling etc., for air or soil pollution as well as emissions of greenhouse gases."