16
votes
Can helium-3 create a gold rush on the moon?
Link information
This data is scraped automatically and may be incorrect.
- Title
- Earth's next quantum revolution might depend on strip-mining the moon
- Authors
- Robin George Andrews
- Word count
- 1957 words
For reference, last time looked into this you need to get to the area of $100 milllion per kilogram to profitably take moon rocks back to earth.
These are "pick them up off the ground" rocks. Not "extract H3 with machinery".
So with that in mind, as always, I would say "no fucking way.". The amount of infrastructure we need to build first to even get near profitable is tremendous.
It's probably the sci Fi I've been reading recently, but surely it would be cheaper to launch stuff (mostly) one way from the moon. Exceeding the moons gravity and slingshoting back to earth would be a simpler task than going from the earth to the moon. So you launch all the setup hardware and a bunch of non human rated return pods once, and then you only have to refill the pods when you run out.
Still a gargantuan task that we are no where near close to, but a cool idea.
Sure. Its just that 90% of the cost is getting all that shit there in the first place.
The return trip is "easy" in comparison. Getting mining machinery and lift rockets that can carry a bunch of H3 back and not be wrecked on re-entry on the surface is the hard part.
Every pound you lift is expensive as hell and has to go through tremendous forces, and that's not even considering you will need some humans there almost certainly. This isn't just a rover moving extremely slowly and picking up rocks.
I wonder what the economics are like around, mining, refining, constructing some of the required machinery there on the moon.
I'm rather than just going straight for the h3, start and grow an industrial base, in parallel with earth deliveries. The idea being that you could drastically reduce the mass you need to ship.
I can’t even imagine the scale of resources you’d need to go from “a few (ludicrously expensive) launches to get started” all the way to “autonomous self-assembling mining and smelting and processing and construction in a vacuum with 1/6 gravity without people to fix things if they get snagged” but I can’t imagine that would be easier on the moon than it is on Earth, and as far as I can tell it’s not possible on Earth.
Getting to the moon is staggeringly expensive, yes, but even that is probably dwarfed by the costs of having a self-assembling factory on the moon.
About the only thing I can think of that tips the favour the other way would be time — if you don’t care about the result on a human timescale, I guess you could launch a few robust self-repairing machines today and maybe in a few centuries they’ll finish what you need. But by then surely it will be cheaper and easier to launch what you need in much less time?
It's not gonna be cheap for centuries, but part of me wonders what we could have setup in the 50 years since the moon landing if that space race kept up, as opposed to winding down then underfunding NASA for 30 years. Initial infrastructure and R&D is always a high upstart cost, bu the hopes are that supply lines can bring down continual costs.
Another part of me thinks that it might be for the best to not have yet another celestial body ruined by humanity.
Easy solution: put all the pollution and garbage dumps on the far side of the moon! /s
It is funny to think that we could stick all our industry on the side of the moon we can’t see, and preserve the view that humans have enjoyed for our entire existence, but that’s probably not gonna be the case.
If a tree falls down in a forest does it make a sound?
Similarly, if there are countless beautiful planets in the universe that no one experiences, does is matter?
Have you been reading "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" by any chance? That was my immediate thought when I saw the headline.
No but it's on my shelf to read next!
I agree with this assessment based on my reading. I suspect the only way it would become viable would be if our terrestrial sources for helium-3 withered away and our need remained steady or increased so that the "value" skyrocketed (heh).
Perhaps if we already had built a profitable or entirely critical mineral extraction process on the moon, it could "go along for the ride" to a degree. We'd be talking about decades and enormous sums of money and resources to even get to that point though.
Yeah until we find a "sane" way to get out of the gravity well we're always stuck with absurd costs.
You're either looking at original space plans of getting waaaay more involved in space stations as staging points, or "theoretical only/just solve this one major material science problem" megastructures like Space Elevators/Skyhook's.
Or someone finally cracks engines that work from ground to space. Aerospikes were one of the concepts and I forget the term for the others.
Either way people really need to internalize that "giant skyscraper explosion followed by Mach 50 face tank re-entry" will never be a reasonable way to do anything in space. If we don't solve those issues, everything else is marketing.
I feel like Betteridge's Law of Headlines would apply here.
IIRC, there's only one private entity (Axiom Space) who's actively trying to put a continuously-manned space station into orbit. According to Wikipedia, they planned on assembling four modules and attaching them to the ISS by 2024. They had money issues in 2023, scaled back the anticipated size of their initial station in 2024, and secured more funding in 2026. They are running their business (or at least the engineering dept) out of a refurbished "Fry's Electronics."
NASA wants to deorbit the ISS in 2030, with the Axiom Space Station running independent of the ISS by 2028. They have yet to place a single module, and it is currently May of 2026.
If private entities have yet to clear that hurdle, any talk about industry on another celestial body is pure fantasy. We don't have anything resembling a factory in LEO, let alone the Moon.
Not saying it's impossible, just highly improbable, till more realistic milestones are met.
I hope not. Ideally, space exploration will forever be a purely publicly funded enterprise.
Wikipedia has some data on the Helium 3 market:
2000$/liter price, at a yearly consumption of 70000 liters per year in the US; that's during a shortage. Make that 140 million dollars per year. Recycling has improved since then, as has production, so prices have supposedly recovered while consumption is down. Using 114g/m^3 (also from that WP section), that's about 8 kg of traded He3 per year, times 20M$/kg from the article roughly matches the total yearly. So that all roughly checks out.
Even if the world market is ten times that, and it likely isn't, that's 2 billion a year, max. Assuming prices don't deflate from you dumping substantial amounts of it.
That stuff's just not useful enough until we reach commercial nuclear fusion. I'd see more potential in rare, but high-demand commodities. Say, rare earth elements. We trade a shitton of the stuff, it's available on the moon (not sure if feasible to get to, but that's beside the broad strokes argument here), and we'd use more of it here if it were available. Yes, per kilo it's more expensive. But it's not the return trip that's expensive, it's getting all the mining equipment up there, which means if it's easier to mine than some elusive, trace isotope, that's a win.
The return trip could just be a catapult, or a chemical rocket. Getting stuff off the moon is substantially easier than getting stuff off earth. Like, 2km/s dV vs 9km/s. And fuel mass is exponential in dV required. => a 60s tech human rated lunar ascent stage required 50% of its mass be fuel. That's nothing, in rocketry terms. The same program's Saturn V had about a 90% ratio on earth ascent, per stage, across multiple stages.
Basically: You don't care that much how heavy it is to ship it back. In fact, if it's just a slug of metal you might not even worry about heat shielding it, just drop it in the desert. Can't do that with a gas. What you do care about is the complexity of extraction, because launching stuff (humans and their support equipment, and/or the actual mining equipment) is what's driving the cost.
I'm not saying the case for mining other stuff is great, all I'm saying is the case for other minerals is likely better because there you can actually go for some semblance of scale.