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: the Moon
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The mission to mine the Moon
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Why Trump must build a nuclear reactor on the Moon
Sean Duffy, the secretary of transportation whom President Trump appointed last month as temporary leader of NASA, has issued a directive to fast-track efforts to put a nuclear reactor on the moon. “To properly advance this critical technology to be able to support a future lunar economy, high power energy generation on Mars, and to strengthen our national security in space,” he says.
A small nuclear reactor on the moon is a good idea, but the directive is about more than that: it is about renewing America’s leadership in space exploration that, with its magnificent achievements receding into the past, looks vulnerable.
Bill Nelson, NASA’s last leader, didn’t mince his words when it came to the new rivals, China. “It is a fact: we’re in a space race.” He warned that Beijing could establish a foothold and try to dominate the most resource-rich locations on the lunar surface – or even shut the United States out. At a Congressional budget hearing he held up a picture of the moon’s crater-pocked south pole which has valuable resources of water ice in its permanently shadowed regions.
“That is where we are going and where China is going,” he said, “with so many craters it’s a dangerous place to land. My concern is if China were to get there first and say this is our territory, you stay out.”
According to the 1967 Outer Space Treaty nobody can lay claim to the moon, but if you place a nuclear reactor on its surface, you can get around that rule. This is why Mr Duffy says, “it is imperative the agency move quickly.” He cites plans by China and Russia to put a reactor on the moon by the mid-2030s as part of a partnership to build a base there. If they were first, China and Russia “could potentially declare a keep-out zone” that would inhibit what the United States could do there.
Duffy stated that the reactor will be required to generate at least 100 kilowatts of electrical power – enough for about 80 households – and be ready to launch in late 2029. Experts, however, think that’s not feasible. Living on the moon is all about power. For a few days batteries will do but for longer you will need solar and nuclear power. Both NASA and China’s plans for a moonbase in the 2030s focus on the south polar region, where the sun is never high over the horizon and the depths of some craters have permanent shadows.
In these regions there are certain crater rims and ridges where the sun shines almost all the time making them valuable sites for solar power and the most important regions on the moon. The plan would be to set down a placeholder nuclear reactor and then declare an exclusion zone.
However, the US return to the moon is increasingly a mess. The first landing under the Artemis programme is scheduled for 2027, but no one expects it to be met. Essential components – including SpaceX’s Starship lunar lander – have failed and will need a sustained record of success before any thought is given to trusting them with the lives of astronauts. The other moon return components, the Space Launch System rocket and the Orion crew capsule that NASA has been working on for more than a decade, are also in trouble. They are expensive, face technical difficulties and are way behind schedule.
At the same time China has said it intends to put its own astronauts on the Moon by 2030, possibly sooner, and prospect the resources there. Will China win the next space race? Space is important to China, “To explore the vast cosmos, develop the space industry and build China into a space power is our eternal dream,” said President Xi Jinping, “the space dream is part of the dream to make China stronger.” Space has excited China’s growing middle class in a way that has not happened to its great rival – the United States – since the heady days of the race to the Moon against the Soviet Union.
China seeks dominance in the third space age. The first space age ended with the fall of the USSR in 1991. The second space age was again dominated by governments and space stations but with a growing number of other countries. The third began about a decade ago when Elon Musk’s SpaceX reused a core booster rocket. Now there are more countries than ever involved in space and a growing number of commercial companies. It’s never been busier, over the next decade there are more than a hundred planned missions, crewed and uncrewed, to the Moon.
In retrospect the first two space ages look simple as the United States and the USSR generally stayed out of each other’s way. Now space is so important to society, national defense and pride that it is once again a source of tension.
Neither side can get their small nuclear reactors onto the lunar surface soon enough.