For some reason i read the title as “Taking Moon Shining seriously”. Twice.
Good article though.
Oh, we should take that seiorusly, too.
I would link Lunar moonshine would require a reflux column six times taller than on Earth due to the lower gravity, making the still easier to spot, but on the other hand, vacuum distillation should be a snap. 🙂
I wish the term “cold fusion” would disappear from the language–or at least from discussions of He3 fusion.
Also, those “Soviet explorers” were robotic (or perhaps merely mechanical).
The mining of propellant feed stocks for in-space use and Moon Express’s money-making ideas about writing marriage proposals in the lunar dust, etc. may be feasible, but the gist of the article is that the moon is almost literally a potential gold mine of rare-earth elements and helium-3.
If I may in this context point out two inconvenient facts:
1. The price of refined terbium on earth is about $4000/kg, that of palladium less and that of gadolinium quite a bit less. The cost of space access would have to come down by many orders of magnitude before lunar mining to meet terrestrial needs could make any sense. It’s more plausible that alternatives to very expensive metals will be found and that re-cycling and reclamation techniques will be improved.
2. Despite six decades of trying, fusion reactors burning He-3 or any other fuel are neither in existence nor on the horizon. Even if the engineering problems are solved, there’s no sign that they will be economic even if run on earth-sourced fuel, let alone fuel imported from the moon. We can hope that an He-3 fuel cycle will make sense someday, but it’s just a hope.
For some reason i read the title as “Taking Moon Shining seriously”. Twice.
Good article though.
Oh, we should take that seiorusly, too.
I would link Lunar moonshine would require a reflux column six times taller than on Earth due to the lower gravity, making the still easier to spot, but on the other hand, vacuum distillation should be a snap. 🙂
I wish the term “cold fusion” would disappear from the language–or at least from discussions of He3 fusion.
Also, those “Soviet explorers” were robotic (or perhaps merely mechanical).
The mining of propellant feed stocks for in-space use and Moon Express’s money-making ideas about writing marriage proposals in the lunar dust, etc. may be feasible, but the gist of the article is that the moon is almost literally a potential gold mine of rare-earth elements and helium-3.
If I may in this context point out two inconvenient facts:
1. The price of refined terbium on earth is about $4000/kg, that of palladium less and that of gadolinium quite a bit less. The cost of space access would have to come down by many orders of magnitude before lunar mining to meet terrestrial needs could make any sense. It’s more plausible that alternatives to very expensive metals will be found and that re-cycling and reclamation techniques will be improved.
2. Despite six decades of trying, fusion reactors burning He-3 or any other fuel are neither in existence nor on the horizon. Even if the engineering problems are solved, there’s no sign that they will be economic even if run on earth-sourced fuel, let alone fuel imported from the moon. We can hope that an He-3 fuel cycle will make sense someday, but it’s just a hope.