Posted on 12/27/2005 5:33:07 PM PST by KevinDavis
The president of RSC Energia, Nikolay Sevastiyanov, has spoken frankly about Russian ambitions on their unofficial version of the America's Vision for Space Exploration.
The flamboyant - yet influential - president is under no illusions about the 2012-2014 timeline it would take for his company to support Russia’s first manned mission to the Moon, including the mining of isotope helium-3 by 2020.
(Excerpt) Read more at nasaspaceflight.com ...
it is almost certain that you are incorrect. 100 to 200 yrs is a VERY VERY long time. i'd believe economic viability is over 20 yrs away, but no way 100 to 200.
Interesting, but I'm still skeptical. I can't even keep He-2 in a child's balloon for more than a couple days. It defies logic that He-3 would stay on the moon. Even water doesn't stay on the moon, and it's a much bigger molecule.
I'm willing to be proven wrong, but we could not make it economically viable to put men into Earth orbit over a 45 year period. We're not even close.
Research indicates we have no way to get the energy out of the He-3 without destroying a lot of stuff in the general vicinity.
The earth contains lots of He-2, and because you can't control helium, experts can. Most of the he-2 is found in oil deposits. It is recovered and stored in a salt mine in Amarillo. It is sold by the bureau of Mines to wholesalers, who repack it into the little tanks you buy, and the big tanks i used to inflate weather balloons. But that is He-2, not He-3. He-3 is a solid.
Here is more:
The Energy
That 1 million metric tonnes of He3, reacted with deuterium, would generate about 20,000 terrawatt-years of thermal energy. The units alone are awesome: a terrawatt-year is one trillion (10 to 12th power) watt-years. To put this into perspective, one 100-watt light bulb will use 100 watt-years of energy in one year.
That's about 10 times the energy we could get from mining all the fossil fuels on Earth, without the smog and acid rain. If we torched all our uranium in liquid metal fast breeder reactors, we could generate about half this much energy, and have some interesting times storing the waste.
The Value
About 25 tonnes of He3 would power the United States for 1 year at our current rate of energy consumption. To put it in perspective: that's about the weight of a fully loaded railroad box car, or a maximum Space Shuttle payload.
To assign an economic value, suppose we assume He3 would replace the fuels the United States currently buys to generate electricity. We still have all those power generating plants and distribution network, so we can't use how much we pay for electricity. As a replacement for that fuel, that 25-tonne load of He3 would worth on the order of $75 billion today, or $3 billion per tonne.
The Payoff
A guess is the best we can do. Let's suppose that by the time we're slinging tanks of He3 off the moon, the world-wide demand is 100 tonnes of the stuff a year, and people are happy to pay $3 billion per tonne. That gives us gross revenues of $300 billion a year.
To put that number in perspective: Ignoring the cost of money and taxes and whatnot, that rate of income would launch a moon shot like our reference mission every day for the next 10,000 years. (At which point, we will have used up all the helium-3 on the moon and had better start thinking about something else.)
Reference: Kulcinksi, Cameron, Santarius, Sviatoslavsky, and Wittenberg, "Fusion Energy from the Moon for the 21st Century." 1988. Fusion Technology Institute, University of Wisconsin.
"He-3 is a solid..."
Very interesting. Hard to envision.
Lots of things are hard to envision.
Water, a liquid, is actualy heavier than ice, the solid form of water. Therefore, ice floats on water.
Water reaches its maximum density at 4 deg cent, as it cools further, it becomes lighter.
It's been nearly TWICE that long since we first went there. And nothing compelling has happend to make it either more desireable, or more practicle to return.
This article is 6 years old, and he predicts 15 years, that leaves 9 years:
He3’s scarcity on Earth means that little work has been done in building He3 fusion reactors. But proponents of He3 fusion claim it can cleanly generate enough energy to dwarf rival power supplies lie uranium, coal, or hydroelectricity. Harrison Schmitt, former Apollo astronaut and a one-time visitor to the Moon, is presently a professor of physics at the University of Wisconsin who is involved in efforts to commercialize He3 extraction from the Moon. He suggests that about 17 square kilometres of Moon surface will provide enough energy to power a city of ten million for a year. But he doesn’t see He3 fusion technology being workable for another 15 years, and notes that lunar exploration programs and He3 fusion technology development will have to evolve hand in hand for the scenario to work.
I just noticed, 9 years, and 2006 (next week, equals 2015. The topic of this whole conversation, on post 1 says he predicts the year 2014. Kinda strange.
"I'd say it's very unlikely that He-3 is on the moon. Certainly more rare on the moon than on Earth."
wrong.
Try a little research first:
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/helium3_000630.html
"Scientists estimate there are about1 million tons of helium 3 on the moon, enough to power the world for thousandsof years. The equivalent of a single space shuttle load or roughly 25 tonscould supply the entire United States' energy needs for a year, accordingto Apollo17 astronaut and FTI researcher Harrison Schmitt."
forever the optimist, i think it is different this time because of three or four new players: China, Russia, India, -- and Burt Rutan.
We have to give credit to the Chinese who will scare everyone else into action, and particular credit to Burt Rutan and the many other folks who are showing how it can actually be *done* other than the schlerotic, highly socialist NASA bureaucracy.
i have no doubt that it if is were up to NASA, the 100 to 200 year timeframe is spot on. but i think the Chinese will go for something fast and practical, as will Burt Rutan and/or Virgen and/or Bezios...
if it takes rich tourists to start the migration into space, well, why not? heck, if we could only get pornography up there, the funding problems would be solved!
The White House has withdrawn from treaties in the past, and we DIDN'T sign on to the Moon Treaty specifically for this reason. . . .
I don't want to discredit Burt Rutan. He has been an extremely talented, creative, and prolific aeronautical engineer.
But he hasn't really advanced the state of the art in space travel. Putting an aircraft up to the edge of space requires technical competence, but how you do it has been known for about 50 years.
It also requires a bunch of money. And although it was a "privately" funded enterprise, the individual doing the funding has a greater net worth than half the countries on Earth (that may be an exaggeration, but probably only a slight exaggeration).
Doing anything useful in space (beyond a quick flight up and back so the "tourists" can say "Weeeeeeeeee") requires orbital capability. And that is several orders of magnitude more complex, dangerous, and expensive.
The reason the "Spaceship One" venture seems so "simple" compared to the early NASA suborbital launches, is because those NASA launches were merely first tests launches prior to orbital launches. And those first oribital launches were only warmups for the main acts to follow, Gemini and Apolo. And the goal of the whole enterprise was to get to the Moon. We had already been to the edge of space (in the Spaceship One sense) for years in the X-15.
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