Free Republic

The Trump administration is drafting the legal language that will go into a new international agreement called the Artemis Accords that will create standards of behavior for moon mining practices. U.S. officials will formally negotiate the accords with several space-partner countries considered to have similar interests in lunar-mining endeavors. Some of the countries include Canada, Japan, the United Arab Emirates and those across Europe.

Earlier this year, entrepreneur and X-Prize impresario Peter Diamandis hinted he was about to unveil something amazing: a startup that will mine asteroids for precious metals. “Since my childhood I’ve wanted to do one thing, be an asteroid miner,” Diamandis told Forbes. “So stay tuned on that one.”

For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use. With the oil age starting to appear alarmingly finite, and with governments all over the planet searching for new energy sources, space scientists are looking at yet another fuel source, this one distributed on the moon over billions of years as birds distributed guano on the island of Nauru. The energy source is Helium 3, which exists in minute quantities on earth but which has been deposited on the moon by solar winds, a rapid stream of charged particles from the sun, from the dawn of time. Helium-3, or Astrofuel, as...

<p>I've occasionally gotten emails asking me what I think about the Chinese space program.</p> <p>Now, I'm prompted to respond, with this story about supposed plans to extend the Middle Kingdom to Luna, complete with resource extraction.</p> <p>Well, I sincerely hope that they do so. If they do, there's at least a possibility that it will shake us from our continued complacency toward serious civil space policy in this country. That's not to say that I hope that we'll immediately drop everything and head back to the Moon a la Apollo, but that at least we'll have a useful national discussion about it, which hasn't happened in decades.</p>