There will come a time when the richest people who ever lived will be those who control outer space, in particular the Moon and the asteroids. There are vast resources out there, bound in giant rocks hurtling through space, and in the lunar dust. But the first steps will be taken by the brave, and perhaps the reckless in pursuit of a space dream. If you dream of space, nothing can stop you. Not the disagreement of others or the judgement of experts, neither short-sighted investors nor government regulations. One such dream will happen on the Moon’s surface in just a few months.
The space company Astrobotic will attempt to land at the Moon’s south pole – a region of extensive shadows where ice may have accumulated and the site of the next US human landing. Its Griffin Mission 1 will deploy a small rover to survey the scene with a multi-spectral camera prospecting for a stable isotope of Helium called Helium 3. Its name brightens the eyes of advocates who point out it’s the most valuable resource in space. If the moon’s surface were scattered with diamonds, it would not be worth bringing them back, but Helium 3 is a different matter.
It is used in medical scanners. Since 9/11 the US Dept of Homeland Security has also mandated its use in border-control radiation monitors. Since then, US stockpiles have fallen to 20 percent of what they were. It is usually made from the decay of tritium (an isotope of hydrogen) in nuclear weapons stockpiles. This provides the US with between 22,000 and 30,000 litres a year, out of this it releases between 8,000 – 10,000 litres to maintain a national stockpile. The world is running out of Helium 3.
The Moon could be the answer. Over billions of years it has collected He-3 from the stream of charged particles given off by the sun. Consequently, there could be a million tonnes of Helium-3 in the lunar dust. But how to get it?
The camera on the lunar rover is a joint venture between NASA and Interlune a private company founded by former executives from Blue Origin and Harrison Schmidt the 12th person to walk on the Moon giving him some first-hand experience of the task. They have a plan for a larger rover that will crawl across the surface collecting and sifting the dust extracting the tiny amounts of Helium 3. Their focus is on its collection and they will be looking for partners to provide the means to return it to Earth. It’s estimated that over a hundred tonnes of dust will have to be processed to produce just a gramme of helium. Yet such is its value it could be worth doing at $20 million per kg.
If it works Interlune could become the first entity to mine the Moon which is legal in US law. It already has customers. Finnish company Blufors has an option to purchase tens of thousands of litres of spending “above $300 million.” They want the Helium 3 for its chandelier-like devices known as dilution refrigerators. They are used by quantum computing leader IBM to cool their computers to a level 200 times colder outer space. This makes the fundamental computing components of a quantum computer – qbits – more stable. Existing quantum computers have more than a thousand qubits but there are plans for computers with a million or more requiring more Helium 3 than is available on planet Earth.
The lunar dust contains a much greater amount of many other useful substances. Oxygen and hydrogen in the form of ice will give future colonists oxygen to breathe, water to drink as well as rocket fuel. The dust also has extractable iron, silicon, aluminium and many platinum group metals that will be essential for the long-term function of a moonbase.
Beyond that there are the asteroids, debris from planet formation that contain their own treasure trove of metals and minerals. All the platinum ever mined in the world would fit into a single room. There is far more than that in even a small asteroid. But asteroids have their own problems.
You must get there, excavate, smelt, store and return. It’s technologically beyond us but that doesn’t stop the space dreamers. The Asterank.com database provides estimates of asteroid resources and estimates a profit of $30 billion from mining asteroid Ryugu. Significantly we have already been to Ryugu when in 2020 a Japanese spacecraft returned samples from it. Importantly Ryugu is only 900 metres across which might be an advantage.
I expect the first wave of asteroid miners to pioneer the way with most of them falling by the way. But eventually it will pay off big-time.
Contemplate this. In the near future the very best restaurants in the world will serve you a glass of water at a fabulous price. It will be no ordinary water but brought back from the Moon. Sometime later super powerful quantum computers will power the Earth’s AI infrastructure, cooled by helium 3 mined on the Moon.
Tag: Diamonds
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The mission to mine the Moon
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Cecil Rhodes was on par with the Nazis
The Colonialist, by William Kelleher Storey, is a brave and learned book. I would recommend it to anyone interested in the history of Africa; who has taken sides in the recent quarrel about “Rhodes Must Fall,” in Oxford or other parts of the world; or who wants to entrench themselves in contrary positions in our apparent “culture wars.”
It is the biography of a vicar’s son, born in Bishop’s Stortford, Hertfordshire in 1853, who went as a teenager to Africa to join his elder brother, who’d bought a plot of land in Natal. One day, walking past a stream by the side of a field, he noticed some pebbles gleaming especially brightly. They were diamonds. By the time Cecil Rhodes enrolled as an undergraduate at Oriel College, Oxford, aged 20, he had an annual income of £23,000 – the equivalent of about $2 million today.
Money is power, and the diamond and gold mines of South Africa made Rhodes and his pals prodigiously rich. Today’s billionaires, such as Elon Musk, may make half-hearted attempts to involve themselves in government, but compared with Rhodes they are lightweights. Here was a man whose fantastic wealth and power mania awoke greed in others – among them Alfred Beit and Natty Rothschild – and who eventually encouraged the Liberal imperialists and Colonial Office in London to embrace the dream of taking over an entire continent. We are still living with the consequences.
I know that some Spectator readers think it amusing to see Rhodes as a bit of a hero – or at least scorn those who protested outside the building on the High Street in Oxford adorned by his statue. He was certainly one of the greatest benefactors the university ever had. In his will endowing the Rhodes scholarships he specified that “no student shall be disqualified for election on account of his race or religion.”
William Kelleher Storey explains that, although these are the words, Rhodes probably meant by “race” simply American, British or German (he set aside three scholarships for Germans) and that he did not necessarily envisage giving money to Africans to study at Oxford. He was entirely deaf to Gladstone’s words at the beginning of the First Boer War: “Remember the rights of the savage, as we call him.” Rhodes was unapologetically racist.
At age 20, Cecil Rhodes had an annual income equivalent to $2 million today
Oxford was where his imperialist aspirations flowered. He heard John Ruskin lecture and it made him want England to “found colonies as fast and as far as she is able.” Reading William Winwood Reade’s The Martyrdom of Man when an undergraduate was crucial. Rhodes kept a copy beside him till his death. “That book – which asserted the superiority of Europeans to Asians and Africans as a matter of scientific fact derived from the evolutionists – has made me what I am,” he wrote. Europeans, he sincerely believed, had the most highly developed intellects: “Let me ask those who admit the development of all civilized people from a savage state… how it is that Europeans have advanced, while others have remained in a savage state.” The “Hindoos” and Chinese were cited as being obvious examples.
The Colonialist is primarily a work of history, which places Rhodes’s actions and achievements in the story of Africa. It is not really a personal book, and I wanted much more about the man himself. For example, he and Leander Starr Jameson (of the celebrated raid) probably had some kind of relationship, but because Storey can find no evidence for Rhodes’s homosexuality he does not reflect on it.
Rhodes’s desire to connect the whole of Africa from the Cape to Cairo and to make it all British is described in meticulous detail. And it was to this cause that he devoted his time and money – from his first discovery of diamonds in his brother’s streams to his last days, when he was richer than almost anyone else in the British Empire. By then he was the director of several gold and mining companies and in a position to bribe tribal elders, kings and chieftains with arms and cash to allow him to create a whole new country: Rhodesia. Women play almost no part, and you can’t help feeling that the whole story is essentially gay (though I still can’t explain why this is so obvious on every page).
Open-pit mining for diamonds was catastrophically dangerous, as well as being hideously hard work. But when African laborers fell to their deaths in landslides they were deemed stupid for not understanding the warnings bellowed at them in a language they did not speak. The book astutely reminds us that neither Rhodes nor his American mining engineer and sidekick Gardner Fred Williams had any idea of what life was like in the mines from which they made their millions. Workers would be strip-searched before returning home in case they had stolen a single gemstone, or kept totally naked in corrals for four or five days and then subjected to enemas.
Rhodes pressed on from what is now South Africa to take possession of the territories of modern Zambia and Zimbabwe which for decades bore his name – north and south Rhodesia. And it was he who egged on Jameson to launch his raid on the Transvaal in 1895. The attempt to topple Paul Kruger, the Boer leader, was responsible for the Second Boer War, in which Lord Kitchener behaved with unforgettable brutality towards the Boers, exposing them to scorching heat in concentration camps – a British invention – and killing thousands of civilians.
Storey’s difficulty is that of any historian of European or American background approaching this subject. The Colonial Office and Queen Victoria were initially doubtful about the Rudd Concession of 1888, whereby King Lobengula of Matabeleland supposedly agreed to concede Bulawayo to the British in exchange for guns and money. But even if they doubted the legitimacy of these arrangements, and were prepared to prosecute Jameson for his undoubtedly illegal raid, the British government and their monarch were in the end willing to fight a war to defend the principle which ruled the piratical Rhodes’s life. This was that Africa should not be in the hands of the Dutch, the Portuguese or the Germans – and certainly not the Africans. The continent was far better off being administered by British boys who had been to boarding schools and read Rider Haggard. Rhodes’s influence, based on gold and diamonds, turned the morally nuanced British nation and Empire, which like most institutions was a mixture of good and evil, into a brigand state.
And so the British persuaded themselves that they were entitled to own and plunder Africa, and that such greedy dishonesty was a sign of their moral superiority to the inhabitants. This insanity can largely be attributed to the propensity of suddenly acquired wealth to drive the possessor mad. Rudyard Kipling was a great writer, but his enthusiasm for Rhodes’s vision for Africa was deluded. This cannot be a matter of opinion, like taking sides when discussing Charles I vs Oliver Cromwell in the English Civil War. Those who scream with rage against Rhodes and his legacy are simply right and those who try to defend him and what he did are simply wrong.
Being a wishy-washy white man of a certain age, I want to add, of course, that this is not a reason why Rhodes Must Fall – if by that is meant not just removing his effigies but seeking to erase his memory. We need to know the history – which is so punctiliously told in this book. It has never been related before in such detail, or with such impartiality, or awareness of the rage which the very name of Rhodes inspires in African hearts.
I am glad I’m not a Fellow of Oriel, or Warden of Rhodes House in Oxford, having to work out what to say to the Rhodes Must Fall contingent. Much of Oriel’s wealth and the very existence of Rhodes House derive from crimes every bit as sinister as those perpetrated by the Third Reich.