China's moon plans

Is China planning to mine the moon?

This theory has been floating around for years, and China has officially denied that it plans to dig up helium-3 on the moon.

Helium-3, you may remember, is a substance rare on Earth but apparently abundant on the powdery surface of the moon. It has energy experts and space enthusiasts excited as a potential source of nuclear fuel. After all, helium-3 is said to be extremely potent, nonpolluting, with virtually no radioactive by-product.

I’m far from knowledgeable about this but it’s not hard to find suggestions on the internet that one space shuttle load of the stuff could satisfy U.S. energy needs for a full year.

China, meanwhile, is gearing up its moon program. China plans an unmanned lunar landing sometime before 2012 with a lunar buggy collecting moon samples. Sometime between 2020 and 2025, China says it will realize a manned moon flight.

The People’s Daily Online had a commentary on the moon program this morning, and it quoted extensively the thinking of Ouyang Ziyuan, a geochemist who is in charge of China’s Lunar Exploration Program. It cites Ouyang saying that the moon program will heighten “China's international prestige and the cohesive power of the Chinese nation.”

Then it delves into the moon’s usefulness to China. The commentary suggests China is, in fact, interested in helium-3 as an energy source. “The output of electricity generated by three tons of helium-3 can satisfy China's energy consumption output for a whole year,” it says.

The moon also is useful for space observation, environmental monitoring and “with vital military importance.” Say what? Are we talking about militarizing the moon?

Well, maybe not quite. The commentary suggests moon bases would be used for blasting away at rogue comets and preventing them from smashing into Earth. Thus it would be for the benefit of all humans, not just China, it says. Whew!

On  a related topic, I came across this article on how NASA views the, er, fallout from China's Jan. 11 missile test to destroy an old weather satellite.

It quotes NASA's chief scientist for orbital debris, Nicholas Johnson, as saying that the Pentagon's space surveillance network has catalogued 600 pieces of debris from the destroyed satellite, and is tracking another 300 smaller pieces that have not yet been catalogued.

But it says there may be as many as 35,000 bits of riff raff larger than one centimeter floating in low Earth orbit, posing a danger to all spacecraft.

"Any of these debris has the potential for seriously disrupting or terminating the mission of operational spacecraft in low Earth orbit," Johnson is quoted as saying in the article. "This satellite breakup represents the most prolific and serious fragmentation in the course of 50 years of space operations."

Comments

[Lillian]

It would be more meaningful if all the funds invested into the moon project could be used on the ground to help those living on less than a dollar a day and those have no access to clean water.

[sskennel]

It would be more meaningful if all the funds invested into the moon project could be used on the ground to help those living on less than a dollar a day and those have no access to clean water.

You've got it exactly backwards. If sufficient energy resources were available, desalinization plants could easily provide clean water to everyone on earth. Creating a future of almost unlimited energy resources, instead of the future of steadily-decreasing resources we're looking at now, is the whole point of these He-3 efforts.