Mining the moon is probibitively expensive, fantastically so. The legal issues are irrelevant. It costs millions to get a few pounds into low earth orbit. Getting to the moon and back is fantastically expensive. As a very crude analogy, imagine you're at the bottom of a 20,000 mile deep hole. This represents the earth. You have to lift yourself up to the top. Now you're in-between the earth and the moon. Lower yourself down a 3,000 mile deep hole. Now you're on the moon, ready to begin mining. Have fun hauling the equipment up and down, and hauling the ore back. Maybe you should just mine thorium here on the earth? It's a great nuclear fuel, and there is much less lifting involved in mining it.

You're right. Even the most efficient or clever scheme to mine the moon would be much more expensive than just mining on earth...unless you aren't sending materials back to earth. If you are mining materials for use in space, and not hauling ore and equipment in and out of the Earth' gravity, the economics of lunar mining make sense. That's probably 20-30 years away at the earliest, but that still means the legal issues aren't irrelevant.

I completely agree. It is simply cost prohibitive to send resources back-and-forth between earth and space. A real space program wont start until we can actually have self sufficient moon bases and orbital stations.

breeder reactor...

But otherwise I agree. I figure it would take ~$50,000/kg to remove uranium ORE from the moon, if it merely entailed scooping it off the surface. That's for unseparated ore.

Here on Earth, you can buy uranium for ~$70.00/lb, or ~$145.00/kg. That would be already separated uranium oxide, not ore.

My cost estimate is EXTREMELY generous, it might well cost twice to three times that, and the ore recovered would likely be at most ~10% uranium oxide.

So the recovered uranium from the moon will probably cost at the very least 3500 and 10000 times the price of uranium recovered here.

What a bargain. :)