"Moon" debuts on DVD, Blue Ray in January

"You've been up here too long, you've lost your marbles." Solitary helium-3 miner (Sam Rockwell) confronts himself, literally, aided, after a fashion, by the pre-programmed advice of his smiley-faced computer companion (Kevin Spacey) in Duncan Jones' award-winning premier feature, "MOON," available on DVD and Blue Ray early next year.

Neil Miller
FilmSchoolRejects.com

A few weeks back, director Duncan Jones revealed some of the DVD and Blu-ray release details for the import release of his highly acclaimed film Moon via his twitter account (@ManMadeMoon). And ever since, we’ve been waiting for official word from Sony Pictures Home Entertainment. Today, we have that official word in the form of the press release below. The film will hit Blu-ray and DVD here in the states on January 12th, and it will include what appears to be a solid amount of special features. This includes two commentary tracks, two Q&A featurettes and two behind the scenes featurettes. Not bad for a smaller release.

More HERE.

Is helium-3 mining, as seen in "Moon," a realistic possibility?

Southwestern Sea of Tranquillity - Nov. 2007 - Japan's Kaguya orbiter imaged the flat and exceedingly ancient spot where humans first walked upon the Moon, from 100 kilometers above.

Rare on Earth, Helium-3 is fused deeply in the lowland plains that characterize the Moon's Near Side, and particularly within the Sea of Tranquility near the equator. No one knows how deeply, but it's presence is thought to be within these basins together with certain iron and titanium oxides, as discovered in samples collected here and the Ocean of Storms. Scarce in the lunar highlands, Helium-3 is believed to make up around 20 percent by weight of the loose regolith of the Near Side Seas.

John Matson in 60 Second Science Blog, Scientific American - What if we found a clean, abundant resource that could provide the lion's share of the world's energy needs? How far would we be willing to go to get it...?

That's the question posed—in both a moral and a logistic sense—by the new sci-fi film MOON, directed by Duncan Jones (the son of musician David Bowie), which opens in New York City and Los Angeles this week...

As it turns out, the film depicts a vision quite close to what some researchers describe as a powerful—if extremely difficult—solution to our energy woes.

Gerald Kulcinski, a nuclear engineer and director of the Fusion Technology Institute at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, has been researching the possibility of mining the moon's helium 3 for decades. He is, along with Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison Schmitt, one of the concept's most prominent advocates. (Schmitt wrote an article for Popular Mechanics in 2004 that describes a harvesting operation much like the one Bell manages at Sarang.)

The lunar surface, Kulcinski says, should indeed be loaded with the isotope, which is in the solar wind, the stream of charged particles from the sun. It is scarce on Earth because the planet's atmosphere and magnetic field largely deflect the brunt of the solar wind, but the moon is far less protected. "The only thing that's close to the sun that has neither an atmosphere nor a magnetic field is the moon," Kulcinski says. And samples from the Apollo program show elevated levels of helium 3 compared to the puny amounts available on Earth. Kulcinski estimates that there are a million metric tons of helium 3 embedded in the outermost layer of the moon's crust.

Read the Posting HERE.

Duncan Jones, Director of "Moon"

Popular Mechanics interviews Moon director
Duncan Jones

Erin McCarthy

"Duncan Jones, the movie's director, wanted to make the kind of gritty sci-fi film that he feels is no longer being made. The writer and director walks PM's Digital Hollywood through DIY FX on a budget, answering to astronauts at NASA and the difference between artificial intelligence and anthropomorphized computers. Plus, check out the Moon trailer HERE."

"I read a book by Robert Zubrin, Entering Space. It was all about how we could financially justify colonizing the solar system; there was a chapter on colonizing the moon and using helium-3 as a source for fusion power. It did seem to be a very logical argument about why you would have a reason to set up a moon base. I think one of the things that is limiting about NASA leading the space race is that everything they do is researched, but it doesn't have any direct relevance to how it affects our lives. But with helium-3, there is a very direct link to how we could use that as a resource here on Earth and why it would be profitable."

Jones, after receiving favorable from private screenings for cinematic legends Terry Gilliam and Neil Gaiman, says he now anxiously awaits a review from Ridley Scott. His next project, though not a squeal, takes up where the world portrayed in Scott's 1982 classic Blade Runner leaves off, in not-to-distant future Berlin.

Read the Popular Mechanics interview HERE.