There exist energy resources so rare that some would move the moon to get them. One of them is hélium 3 – an isotope of helium, the gas which makes your voice funny, among other things, when breathed in.

 

As with hydrogen, most helium 3 was produced by the primordial nucleosynthesis during the Universe's birth pangs. Prized mainly for a number of specific applications and especially for its extraordinary energy properties, the gas exists only in very small quantities on Earth.

 

With applications in many domains, it is used in complex low temperature physical measurements as well as in certain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in hospitals. As of today, there is no better method to obtaining precise images of the lungs than by nuclear magnetic resonance, by having a patient inhale a dose of polarized helium 3. And that is not all. Helium 3 has such extraordinary military applications that the American army's security services use it for the detection of dirty bombs. 

 

Helium 3 was also at the origin of the work which culminated in a triple Nobel prize in physics in 1996, awarded to David M. Lee, Douglas D. Osheroff and Robert C. Richardson for having shown that this isotope was capable of superfluidity at very low temperatures. And most importantly – we will come to it a little later – very serious scientists believe that relatively small quantities of helium 3 would be enough to meet the entire planet's energy requirements. 

 

Naturally, as for any rare Earth element, the demand is enormous while the supply is all too limited. Just a few years ago, scientists and the military were still able to procure quantities of this gas without too much trouble. During the Cold War, when the United States and the USSR were busy producing nuclear weapons with a vengeance, helium 3 was considered nothing more than a residue of tritium decay, one of the elements used in making the famous hydrogen bomb. And, to be frank, the remains, well, they didn't interest anyone.

Then over time, with the work of some added to the discoveries of others, the properties of helium 3 became apparent to all. As making bombs was out of the question now that the squabble was over, scientists found a way of decaying tritium and obtaining helium 3 without having to build machines capable of blowing up the Earth in a trice.

But the problem was that there was not enough tritium to make the amounts of helium 3 required, as it is also very rare in its natural state on Earth. In keeping with the economics of scarcity of resources, there followed a rather dizzying price hike in 2010, with the market value of helium 3 going from 150 dollars per liter to figures touching 5000 dollars today. [1]

Faced with this slightly complicated situation, thinktanks in America's Department of Energy tried hard to come up with alternatives. For the detection of radioactive neutrons or gamma particles – which are found in dirty bombs, for example – boron 10, one of boron's isotopes – a trivalent metalloid found in abundance on the Earth's surface – seems to do the trick.

 

But as regards medical applications like, for example, looking inside lungs, nothing comes close to helium 3. It was then that an idea, which had been in vogue for close to a decade, resurfaced: going to the moon to get the precious gas.

 

Before tackling this incredible possibility of transforming the Moon into a mining colony, we must first understand how this unique satellite of the blue planet could be such an incredible "helium mine", a veritable "heldorado". In fact, eminent astrophysicists at the Paris, Geneva and CNRS [2] Observatories – and they are not the only ones – believe that helium 3 is produced mainly by the stars, with our Sun leading the way. The solar wind acts like a vector, scattering the precious gas to the four corners of the solar system.

 

Pushed away by Earth's magnetic field, helium 3 accumulates on the Moon's surface, with the absence of an atmosphere facilitating the operation. And that is how such enormous reserves – estimated at a million tons, perhaps more, compared to the meager 15 tons on Earth – lie waiting to be tapped.

 

And when someone like Harrison Schmitt, twelfth and last man to have stepped on the Moon as part of the Apollo program, and the only Earth scientist to have walked on a heavenly body, stated in a publication [3] that only 200 tons of helium 3 could satisfy the energy requirements of the United States and the European Union for an entire year, we suddenly understand why some people yearn for a trip into space.
 

The biggest exporter of rare Earth elements thanks to the wealth of its soil, China is keenly interested in the Moon's helium 3. It made its ambitions clear in 2006 through very well thought-out and structured plans. After having announced a very precise plan regarding the energy requirements of the Middle Kingdom, Ouyang Ziyuan, scientist and head of the Chinese Lunar program proclaimed at the time that « the first to conquer the Moon would be the first to benefit. » 

 

According to the plans, the Chinese envisage establishing a lunar base in 2024 and to begin refining helium 3 from the following year, if the required technology can be developed by then. Though we have not heard much from the Chinese regarding this over the past two years, the affair, if it did materialize, should by all means generate a world-wide debate at some point or the other, withThe UNO''s 1967 Treaty on Outer Space [4], implying that the Moon and its resources are the common heritage of mankind. While the Americans, under the leadership of Obama, have officially decided to abandon a similar project, the Russians and even the Indians had voiced their desire to join the Moon race for helium 3.

 

But having come to this stage, one must also wonder whether the Moon would be only a step in the human endeavor to meet its energy requirements by exploiting the resources of Earth's neighbors. Alan Stern, a researcher at the Southwest Research Institute in the United States declared in the December issue of the Astronomical Journal[5] that he and his team had found proof of the existence of complex hydrocarbons on Pluto:

 

« We spent forty years looking for hydrocarbons on Mars and we never found any. And then, as we looked at the farthest spot in the solar system, they were there! We are not yet sure of the exact type of hydrocarbons, but they are not central to biology. They are the type that we use as fuel. » 

 

And the list seems to be growing longer every day, with other scientists talking of the possibility of retrieving helium 3 from... Uranus. All this is very fine on paper, but we still need to invent the means of journeying there.