“You can’t just shoot a hole into the Moon.”

MISSION OBJECTIVE: Shoot a hole into the Moon.

https://interestingengineering.com/culture/eare-earths-mine-usa-china

Most rare‑earth ore occurs as a geochemical stew, so producers must grind, acid‑leach, and solvent‑wash huge volumes of rock before they bottle a kilogram of oxide. The solvents themselves are toxic; the tailings ponds can leach heavy metals; and any thorium or uranium hitch‑hikers raise radioactivity concerns.

Open‑pit mines also chew through landscapes, consume prodigious energy, and disrupt local water tables. In short, the elements may not be geologically rare, but clean, socially acceptable production sites are. That scarcity, not crustal abundance, keeps supply tight and prices volatile.

That’s an excellent point.

I don’t really know what the launch detection sensors’ capabilities are. However, there’s probably a detectably different spectrographic signature from solid fuel rockets like ICBMs versus Neutron’s methalox.

There are no minable deposits of rare earths anywhere. That’s why they’re called rare earth elements. Nowhere on Earth are there geologic processes that concentrate them into ores. The only way to get them is to process absolutely enormous volumes of dirt, at great expense in terms of energy used and pollution created.

Every country has them.

Who sells it is a question of which country is willing to render some portion of their territory uninhabitable for the foreseeable future, while also making a larger portion of their territory sick and dirty.