Helium-3?

What follows is a request to the readers. Does anyone know of any
instance when an official of NASA, the Department of Energy, or the
White House mentioned lunar mined Helium-3 as a justification for going
back to the Moon in the recent past? This is for an article that is
scheduled to appear in a major publication.

Thanks in advance.

Rand Simberg wrote:
On 6 Dec 2004 10:52:44 -0800, in a place far, far away,
made the phosphor on my monitor glow in such a
way as to indicate that:

What follows is a request to the readers. Does anyone know of any
instance when an official of NASA, the Department of Energy, or the
White House mentioned lunar mined Helium-3 as a justification for
going
back to the Moon in the recent past? This is for an article that is
scheduled to appear in a major publication.

Thanks in advance.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems...1/s1252715.htm

Google is your friend...

Rand, thanks, but I already have this piece and have cited it. No one
quoted is ab actual official of NASA, DOE, or the administration.

Rand Simberg wrote:
On 6 Dec 2004 10:52:44 -0800, in a place far, far away,
made the phosphor on my monitor glow in such a
way as to indicate that:

What follows is a request to the readers. Does anyone know of any
instance when an official of NASA, the Department of Energy, or the
White House mentioned lunar mined Helium-3 as a justification for
going
back to the Moon in the recent past? This is for an article that is
scheduled to appear in a major publication.

Thanks in advance.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems...1/s1252715.htm

Google is your friend...

Rand, thanks, but I already have this piece and have cited it. No one
quoted is ab actual official of NASA, DOE, or the administration.

Thanks, Rand, but I already have this piece and have cited it. No one
quoted there seems to be an actual official of NASA, DOE, or the
administration,

Rand - I know and very likely the article will run with "Officials
declined to comment" or some such thing, but the editors I'm working
with would like a good faith effort.

On 6 Dec 2004 10:52:44 -0800, in a place far, far away,
made the phosphor on my monitor glow in such a
way as to indicate that:

What follows is a request to the readers. Does anyone know of any
instance when an official of NASA, the Department of Energy, or the
White House mentioned lunar mined Helium-3 as a justification for going
back to the Moon in the recent past? This is for an article that is
scheduled to appear in a major publication.

Thanks in advance.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems...1/s1252715.htm

Google is your friend...

On 6 Dec 2004 11:25:13 -0800, in a place far, far away, "Mark R.
Whittington" made the phosphor on my monitor
glow in such a way as to indicate that:

Thanks, Rand, but I already have this piece and have cited it. No one
quoted there seems to be an actual official of NASA, DOE, or the
administration,

Well, you may have a tough time coming up with that.

John Savard wrote:

Given, however, that Helium-3 would only be useful if we already had
controlled thermonuclear fusion power, I don't know if we can really
fault the politicians for not counting lunar Helium-3 among the reasons
for going to the Moon.

Getting fusion reactors working is probably the *easy* part of using 3He.
Mining the moon for it is going to very challenging. The concentration
of the gas in the regolith is very low, so very large scale extraction
will be needed, consuming a significant fraction of the energy content
of the gas. Fueling the US economy would require putting the power
production of a small country on the moon to drive that extraction.


But the statement in the article that no energy research not related to
petroleum is being funded - that is shocking (if it is even true).

It's not true.

Paul