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.

Lunar Networks: Hyde County Moon Port?

North Carolina has surfaced in commercial space industry rumor mills again as a site for future private spacefaring. Several locations are under scrutiny in secret negotiations with North Carolina's Department of Commerce, and sources indicate the private consortium "Lunar Networks" has narrowed it's search for a site to develop an east coast space port to three locations near the Pamlico Sound.

"North Carolina has several things in its favor," a representative of the developers said. "It's the last place on the eastern seaboard that hasn't been completely taken over by development. The sites were examining all have a wide arc of eastern window, making them prime locations for launching into the orbital plain of the International Space Station to both ascending and descending nodes."

After the abandonment by NASA of the Single-Stage-to-Orbit (SSTO) concept several years ago North Carolina's aggressive promotion of two relatively low populated "inner banks" launch sites to Lockheed Martin for the now-defunct X-33 and VentureStar came to an abrupt end. The region inside the more famous Outer Banks and the Cape Hatteras National Seashore has suffered from high unemployment and isolation indemic to geology and geography since before Blackbeard and the days of Colonial North Carolina, and a century earlier the famous Lost Colony of Roanoke Island.

North Carolina has been more friendly to business moving in from outside the state, offering special incentive programs to Dell Computers and Google, including decades of sales and property tax exemptions. Reliable sources indicate "the consortium" is in intensive and very closed-door negotiations with North Carolina's Department of Commerce, the state's Port Authority and legislative leaders and staff.

This site is dedicated to reporting on these developments, without spoiling the deal.

Much of the success of the venture, code named "ascending note" depends on political developments after the 2008 election. In 2007, Google and the N.C. Department of Commerce reached a complex deal behind closed doors to build a server farm in the similarly economically distressed Caldwell County, in western North Carolina, the details of which began to leak out before the Internet online application giant was ready, and "heavy handed threats" to legislative staff, some say, came out in Emails leaked to the press.

The clam tight secretive "Lunar Network" consortium is working hard but with tactical patience. Local county commissioners have been approached cautiously, with "zero promises" made on either side.

The "Consortium" representative, who works for a well-connected Raleigh legislative lobbying firm, denied the "rump organization" was connected to Google or involved in contending for Google's recent "X-Prize" competition, offering $30 million to the first private company to land and return a robotic spacecraft from the Moon.

"They are looking at the Moon," he said. "In fact, their calling them the Consortium in Raleigh, but amongst themselves, they call themselves Lunar Networks." But their representatives in Raleigh and along the Inner Banks are, he said, "are definitely taking the long view."

Among three North Carolina locations for what may be the second Moon Port constructed on the U.S. eastern seaboarn, 800 miles "as the Shuttle flies" from Merritt Island and Pad 39 is what many contend is the largely failed "Global TransPark," a "field of dreams" contructed to move eastern North Carolina mainstay agricultural products to world a decade and a half ago. The TransPark is considered to be the most striking example of wasted taxpayer-funded economic incentive money in the state.

Adjacent to the borderline commercial Kinston Regional Jetport, the TransPark might well be one of the cheaper alternatives for development of a Space City, but the local population is relatively concentrated and encroaching from all directions; a bad place for a catastrophic spacecraft accident. Instead, the Inner Banks also host North Carolina's largest, lowest populated and poorest of the state's 100 counties, the only truly dry land anywhere more than 150 miles from the busy, prospering Interstate 95 with its many attendant Road Cities.

Hyde County, site of one of the two locations studied by Lockheed-Martin to build a launch site for the VentureStar, is losing population in 2007's fastest growing state.

"The Global TransPark," the LN spokesman said, "is not really their favorite spot. The insiders who introduced North Carolina to the Lunar Network people had the TransPark in mind, looking for a way for the state to unload what they believe is a notorious White Elephant. But the Department of Commerce people are still holding out hope that the TransPark will live up to the huge investment the state has paid out, and is still paying. So a lot of this is science fiction that depends on what the voters decide in November."

This reticent representative of something called "Lunar Networks" wouldn't deny they were looking "around Hyde County," but said "we don't want to sell anyone false hope. There's a rumor that's hung on for a generation or more out that way that Disney had plans on building another park there. Lord knows how that got started. Maybe they were planning on it once. Maybe they are still. It may be one big bean field surrounded by poor commercial fishermen now, but who knows what the southern Great Dismal will look like 100 years from now.

"And they may end up moving offshore. There's a strong contengent that insists they should move below the 30th parallel, farther south than Kennedy, where they can directly intersect the plain of lunar orbit, without using fuel to line up at the nodes.

"The ISS certainly passes almost directly overhead in North Carolina once or twice a day, with it's fifty one degree inclination to the equator, but the Moon's orbit never comes this far north.
"Then again, these guys and gals are all-America folks, who don't want to be at the mercy of some tin-pot dictator or regime with a whole army with its hand out. What they have in mind is very long-term, something that will be in operation, in harmony with the host community and a good neighbor for the next century or more.

"When you think about it," he said, revealing nothing and, perhaps, everything, "a whole lot of what may happen in a whole lot of lives depends on how people vote who haven't got, and will not have, a clue as to what's at stake for them and their grandchildren."

I pressed him, after this, to tell this North Carolina voter, who lives directly on the hundreds of miles of the quiet Inner Banks which Party works best with the secret vision of the Lunar Networks consortium, he said, "a little of both, I guess."

But after tapping his fingers in silence, as we meditated over our lunch at Raleigh's Player's Retreat, he spoke. "I'll tell you this much. Let's just say there are people in the present leadership of the legislature, and the Administration, who are being, shall we say, a little shortsighted and stubborn."

North Carolina's Governor cannot run for re-election, and both Republicans and Democrats are jostling to take his seat in 2009. The Governor's Mansion, the entire Counsel of State and both houses of North Carolina's General Assembly are up for election this year.