← T-Minus: Space-Cyber Briefing
T-Minus: Space-Cyber Briefing
The business case for returning to the moon.
00:22:11
Lunar Helium-3 Mining is looking to mine the Moon’s rarest and most strategic resource, Helium-3, for green energy and quantum computing. Find out more.
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You're listening to the N2K space network.
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Helium 3 oh yeah. It has created a buzz in the space industry of late. Could this non radioactive isotope of helium that's super rare on Earth but abundant on the Moon be of use to us here on Earth? You bet. Could it help build a business case for humanity's return and sustained presence on the moon? Oh yeah, that too foreign this is T minus deep Space. I'm Maria Varmazes. The company Lunar Helium 3 Mining or LH3M say that they are at the forefront of the green energy revolution and the quantum computing era. And they're at that forefront with plans to tap into the Moon's rarest and most strength strategic resource, Helium 3. I spoke to LH3M CEO and Chief Engineer Chris Salvino.
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I'm Chris Salvino. I'm the CEO of a company called Lunar Helium 3 Mining that up until maybe six months ago many people have never heard about but we'll be talking about that a little bit today. My background is kind of eclectic. It's medicine. On one hand I have do part time medicine as a physician, but on the other hand my big background is in space. I have degrees in planetary geology, engineering, mining, aerospace engineering and operational engineering. So it's kind of an eclectic background which really points a lot towards the moon and what type of resources are on the lunar surface.
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Well, that is an incredibly impressive resume. I just have to Say, not every day I speak to a polymath. So that's wonderful. I'm just really thrilled. So, Chris, the burning question in my mind that I know we wanted to chat about today was why do we need a better business case for going back to the moon? Because this is one of those questions that I think gets talked a lot at the pub, so to speak, where people have, you know, questions about why are we going back to the moon? How is this actually going to work? I don't hear it as much phrased in this way within sort of the space industry realm. So I'm really fascinated that this is something you have a strong point of view on. So I would love to hear your thoughts on that.
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First off, my little commercials go to our social media because that exact topic is being posted this week and next week. The question is, why are we going back to the moon? So I guess the first question is what about lessons learned? Before we talk about why go back to the moon, let's look back at Apollo. So Apollo is a great benchmark about why to go back to the moon. Many people know about it, but some people don't. So at the high level, we had a space race with Russia. It was capitalism or the American way versus communism back in the 60s and Kennedy had a 10 year commitment to do that. It was a famous speech he gave. So the whole idea was, who's better, Russia or United States? That was the space race. That's what it was all about. And it captivated the world at an interesting time. There was no TikTok videos, cell phones or computers. And so the first landing on the moon in 1969, there was 600 million people that watched it. I believe it's the largest audience ever on tv. And so it captivated the world. The United States. It was thrilling. It was really, really cool. But here's the interesting thing. After that flag was planted and we quote, beat the Russians, there were supposed to have been 20 missions to the moon. There was only six. The American public and the rest of the world kind of got bored with it and the taxpayer said no, the Congress said no. So it was cut from 20 down to six missions at a time when the United States was nowhere near as much in debt as we are now, at a time when the social media was nowhere near like it is now. So the question is, what did we learn about that capital intensive time which leads us to the future, which is now we have the intent to go back to the moon with Artemis, which is for some of your folks, Most probably would know it. Some people that don't is that's the US initiative to go back to the moon. So why.
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Yeah, we don't have that ideology pushing us the sort of ideological fervor as strongly anyway as we did in the first space race. Right, right.
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There's no doubt that we are sort of now on a. Maybe not as obvious, but now we're in a space race with China. So are we going to go to the moon for a capital intensive reason such as a space race, or are we going there for water and rocks or are we going there as a precursor to going to Mars? Those are typical governmental types of public interest. The question is, is the public going to be that captivated to go back for water Iraqs or to race against China at a time when our deficit is I think three and a half times worse than the 60s at a time when the American public and the world's public doesn't pay attention to the news. They're under cell phones, they're watching media. So my big concern is going back for a public reason such as that is not. I'm going to make a hazardous guess that it's not sustainable. How many Artemis missions will there be before it gets canceled? I think many space companies would like to see it sustain. People are talking about building habitats, building rovers, building solar panels, putting a nuclear fission reactor on the moon. Question is ultimately who's paying for it? Why are we going to do it? So I predict, and I've, I hate to say it, I don't think it's going to be sustainable. However, I offer a positive solution. I believe there is a revenue generated reason to go back to the moon.
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Okay, so we have this very interesting set of dynamics right now. Just if I understand correctly, the argument that you're making here, again, we don't have that ideological fervor that we did during the first space age space race. Rather we are in a space race now. I think that's, as you said, pretty widely accepted, except the public interest is not there, they're not engaged. And I think that's absolutely correct based on what we've seen. NASA and other space agencies and space organizations are always struggling to get public opinion, trying to get out of the bubble of nerds like me who like space. And so if we don't have that level of public support, how will we have the financial support for what is, as you say, extremely expensive to go to the moon? And if we couldn't sustain that interest during Apollo, how would we do that during Artemis, I think these are great questions. So where do we go with that? Where do we go from here?
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I think here's where we go with this. And that's where my background, which is kind of bizarre, it's kind of led me to this singular point. There is a potential revenue stream on the surface of the moon that will captivate the American public for different reasons in the world public. And that is a single resource called Helium 3, which is not to be confused with the helium you put in your party balloons. So helium 3 comes from the sun. It gets captured in Earth's atmosphere, so you can't mine it on Earth. Right now we have less than 10 kilos in the United States. So let me say that again, less than 10 kilos in the United States. It's come from that byproduct of Cold War nuclear weapons production. So we have a small amount of it here and it cannot be produced to scale. So there's a substance on the moon that we don't really have on Earth and can't really obtain. So who cares? Well, helium 3 is the fuel source for the future version of nuclear fusion. So nuclear fusion your audience is probably aware of is going to be fueled with something called tritium, which Tritium has to be mined out of the ground from lithium and converted over. So there's a whole process, but there's still nuclear fission related to that. So when nuclear fusion comes on board, that'll be the world's potential first green energy. Because it can't explode. There won't be another Chernobyl. Problem is, and the dirty little secret, nuclear fusion powered with tritium, a substance called tritium, there's waste products that are still stored for over 100 years. It's still fairly dangerous. So it's not the holy grail. But if you can have nuclear fusion done with helium 3, it can't explode, which is super cool. There are no byproducts. It's much safer. You theoretically could power your house with a nuclear fusion reactor in the future with helium 3. So the world's ability to go totally green, totally green energy scalable, is only with nuclear fusion with helium 3.
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We'll be right back.
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That's an important point. And then the second big usage of it is quantum computing. People are talking about quantum. Here's a fun little fact. Do you know how fast a quantum computer is? I can give you an example.
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Yeah, give me. I mean, aside from unbelievably mind bendingly fast, I don't have an actual concrete.
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Mind bending is pretty clear. So here's a concrete example. If you took a string of numbers that was about 2,000 numbers long, there's 2,000 characters in the string of numbers and you wanted to break it down into its prime components, it would take a standard computer about 10,000 years. But a quantum computer can do that in about eight hours.
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It's truly amazing. Just every time I read something about quantum computing, I cannot believe this is reality. And I know it's still in its infancy, which is the part that just blows my mind every time. So, yeah, it's amazing.
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But what does it have to do with helium 3? It's not a fuel source.
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Yes.
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Yeah. So I'll ask my own question. What does it have to do with helium 3? In order for quantum computers to work, they have to be cooled down to 0.01 Kelvin. You cannot cool a quantum computer down without liquid helium 3. If not, you get significant errors. So you. Oh yeah, who cares about quantum computers? Is it just a bunch of research research geeks like me or something? No, I mean, think about it strategically. If the Department of Defense had quantum computers, they could probably break crypto strings. So if we have it over China, there's going to be strategic dominance one country over the other. So whatever has a quantum computer really holds strategic global dominance. So now we're looking at two major use cases. Totally green energy, which is going to save the planet to some extent. And then the strategic use case, from a governmental point of view, is to use it to cool down your quantum computers. Otherwise you're not going to be able to do it. China's announced they're going to go to the moon to extract helium 3. They are going there, I believe, for quantum computing.
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Okay, so as you said, with those two tracks of interest, there certainly would seem, in terms of quantum computing, that's a huge financial case in terms of investing capital from a humongous governmental point of view. And then you have the, on the, the green side of things. That's what will capture the public's interest. Certainly it's a lot easier to explain that than quantum computing to the average person, I would imagine. And also the what's in it for me angle is much more apparent that way too, because people go quantum, as you said, quantum computing, who cares? I'm not, I'm not doing spy satellites as a person, why do I care about that? But being able to power my house for basically free, for something that's not going to pollute, pretty awesome. So that those are two great use cases. So are we, are we going to be able, I think this is the question, are we going to be able to actually get this from the Moon? What is that? Do we have that technology? Is that, is it feasible?
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Let's, let's talk about that in the context of money first. The question is what? We said that those capital intensive things going there looking for rocks and water are capital intensive. Let's put the money part in perspective and talk about the technology, if you don't mind. Right now, Helium 3 is going for about roughly $30,000 a gram, which is about $30 billion a ton with a B. So it's pretty expensive. So if the world went totally green, so imagine the world had nuclear fusion, fusion reactors, and they were all powered by helium 3, and that's how electricity was produced. So that's into the future, but we'll get there at that point in time. That's $17 trillion worth of revenue per year, with a T, $17 trillion. Quantum computing is about 120 billion. There's a lot of money in revenue to actually make this work. So the only resource, the only resource on the surface of the moon that has value to come back from a business point of view, a return on investment is helium 3. That is like what we believe is the tip of the sphere. So if the economy on the moon is based on helium 3 extraction, you're going to need to build rovers around it, movable habitats to go along with the process, communication systems and rockets. So we believe the infrastructure will be built around a positive return on investment, not a governmental capital play. And as far as the equipment goes, to your other point, the equipment that we want to use on the moon to do this is already fairly well known.
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Yeah. Can you walk me through a sense of it, just for conversation sake? Yeah.
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Well, let's also add one more, one more little twist to this because this is important distinction between us and other people that are approaching the moon for Helium 3. If you go to the moon to use to extract helium 3. So if you want to go to the moon to extract it and you go there with an Earth based mining process, it will, we believe, will fail. The moon is totally different. Here's a couple highlights. Number one, the good news is there's a lot of helium three, like a million tons. Like a lot. The bad news is its concentration is like one part per billion. So if you go up there and you try to grind the ground up and harvest it by extracting the ground and put it into a processing plant, the energy of extraction won't work. So you need a low energy method to extract helium 3, which we've come up with. The second thing is the regolith. The dirt is extremely abrasive because there's never been water or wind on the moon. So it looks just like it did 4 billion years ago. It's going to destroy equipment. So you can't go to the moon with an Earth based mining process with a lot of moving parts. So let's just leave it at those top. Two things.
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Sure.
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If you go to the moon and you respect the environment and you respect the concentration and the abrasiveness of the regolith, and you design your equipment around that, you have more likely a chance of success. So at the high level, our process requires minimal energy of extraction, which is unique and it has ironically minimal moving parts. And it's based on technology that we already know about on Earth. We just have to harden it for the moon. Now it sounds kind of simplistic, but it's going to be much more worked than that.
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The devil's always in the details with these things. Of course. Yeah. Implementation is really the tricky part. I'm so curious your thoughts about. You had mentioned the success of Artemis. I'm sort of trying to bring it back to that. Also where you feel helium 3 mining could even. Would that fit into an Artemis timeline somewhere?
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Well, that's a good question. Whether you call it Artemis or whether you call it, let's say, just return to the moon. Return to the moon. Maybe it's a blend.
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Yeah.
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I think this whole process is going to require public private support. Eventually though, we'll get to the point where it's sustainable as a private venture only. So it might start out with some of the Artemis teams up there working on some of the equipment to prove it. Some of it would just be with remote launches to the moon. But eventually it's more than likely going to be not so much public astronauts. It's probably going to be commercial lunar miners. Maybe they won't even be called astronauts. So I do think, I think there's going to be a blend between the public and the private. But there is a pathway so that eventually the private sector would take over because of the return on investment. Foreign.
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That'S T minus deep Space Brought to you by N2K CyberWire we'd love to know what you think of our podcast. Your feedback ensures we deliver the insights that keep you a step ahead in the rapidly changing space industry. If you like our show, please share a rating and review you and your podcast app. Or you can send us an email@space2k.com we would love to hear from you. We're proud that N2K CyberWire is part of the daily routine of the most influential leaders and operators in the public and private sector. From the Fortune 500 to many of the world's preeminent intelligence and law enforcement agencies, N2K helps space and cybersecurity professionals grow, learn and stay informed. As the nexus for discovery and connection, we bring you the people, the technology and the ideas shaping the future of secure innovation. Learn how@n2k.com N2K's senior producer is Alice Carruth. Our producer is Liz Stokes. We're mixed by Elliot Peltzman and Tre Hester with original music by Elliot Peltzman. Our executive producer is Jennifer Ibin. Dear Kilpe is our publisher and I am your host, Maria Varmazes. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.
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