- how speculative are they about the rare material they intend to find?
- how are they going to mine and transport them?
- how much is it going to cost?
- will it be worth it in the end, compared to earth mining (which to this day still requires considerable manpower)?
Until such questions are answered, I think it would be more appropriate to look at this more as robotic experiment, not a moon mining startup project.
But what I like about these guys is that they're in kick down the door and get a search warrant later mode. There is a demonstrated capability in the Falcon9 project to get an earth/lunar/lunar-surface mission together. If you borrow the Merlin engine from SpaceX for your rover, autonomous landing in a gravity well with a power variable engine is a solved problem. [2] So most of the questions vis-a-vis "How do I get something on to the surface to mine?" is an engineering / cost problem rather than a 'create from whole cloth' problem.
The 'knotty bits' in this particular endeavor are then three;
a) Do we deliver a return capability to the surface (aka a return craft) or do we create it on the surface from materials we find there?
b) What is the energy infrastructure, solar? nuclear? And do we build it on site or do we transport it?
c) Of the prioritized targets (in terms of value per lifted ounce of the surface and into low earth orbit) what are the extraction techniques for each and their repeatability?
That would be a helluva lot of fun to play with wouldn't it? Building a series of modules that could deploy on the lunar surface and provide a refinery capability.
Presumably there is a scenario where you put a variety of payloads on the moon and a means to assemble into the infrastructure you need.
[1] http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.ea.05.0...
For instance, here's a map of where cobalt comes from: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/94/2005cobalt_%28.... (Cobalt is essential in making the alloys used in jet engines, so a loss of access to cobalt could serious harm the US militarily).
Having an emergency backup plan for these minerals, such as moon mining, would be good even if it is expensive.
The much bigger obstacle will be political, breezy as the article is about ownership of lunar resources.