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Picture of the Week: It's A Miner Thing, and They're a Miner King September 10, 2008

Posted by Nick Azer in : Base Race, China, Fusion Power, Helium-3, Integration, Picture of the Week, Russia , add a comment

From the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Fusion Technology Institute (by way of the European Space Agency) comes an artist’s rendition of a Helium-3 miner.

Helium-3 is a resource that is rare on Earth, but plentiful on the moon. It’s drawn a lot of interest, including officially from China and Russia, as the primary fuel for fusion power, which is something of the ultimate power source: clean and efficient, one shuttle’s load of Helium-3 from the Moon would be roughly enough to power the United States for one year. And that’s just one load!

While fusion probably won’t turn up until around 2050, that’s about the time we’re expected to be running out of fossil fuels and potentially in need of a new energy source. So, the idea among Russia, China, the U.S., and potential commercial efforts would be to get a headstart on collecting the fuel by stockpiling it early, and developing some kind of dominance over the resource in order to gain leverage (and massive profits).

So, as a result, even though we might not be seeing fusion power itself for a while, we’ll be seeing (and hearing about) miners like the one above much sooner.

"The Future of Urban Planning": The Moon? September 5, 2008

Posted by Nick Azer in : China, Fusion Power, Helium-3, infrastructure, lunar land use planning, NASA, Roscosmos , 2comments

I, your beloved blogger, am a recent graduate with my Bachelor’s in Urban Planning, and part of why I started this blog (despite having a rather different background than your typical space enthusiast) is that I maintain that lunar colonization is, in fact, urban planning. My argument being, that the Moon’s surface is now land for all intents and purposes, and therefore any colony/mine, infrastructure, or other utilization of its surface is land use; and land use planning is the core of urban planning. NASA, Roscosmos, the CNSA, etc. are all well into programs to complete substantial built environments on the Moon by 2030, and so this has become a timely subject.

Once in a while, I find that I am (in fact) not the only one who thinks about these things, and here’s a case in point I came across today.

“In the future, these questions will likely be posed for cities that exist on the moon or Mars… You might think that such a city is unrealistic, but NASA has been planning a “city in the sky” for years.”
-”HowStuffWorks” article on Urban Planning by William Harris

A Wired.com article chronicles NASA’s ‘recurring dream’, with the first substantial and ‘modern’ looks (that included thoughts on industrialization of the moon, a key to current efforts) coming in 1972 and 1975.

Check out that HowStuffWorks article linked above, and keep an eye here for more and more content regarding just what the planning topics are for moon colonization in the next 10 years (the early phase) and beyond. :)

Basics of Moon Colonization, Part 1: When April 4, 2008

Posted by Nick Azer in : Base Race, China, Japan, Russia, Sweden , add a comment

To get us started here at Luna C/I, here’s Part 1 of a quick ‘Visitor’s Guide’ to Moon Colonization, to help you loyal readers get acquainted with the basics of what’s rolling with M.C. in the early 21st Century.

Each of the bits noted in these features will be discussed in greater detail in the future, as developments occur and I complete more specific features on each program. So, without further ado, here’s the general details on When we’ll start seeing lunar bases popping up (and yes, that’s plural):

When: The good ol’ U.S.A. currently has a plan set down to have construction begin on the Moon for a base in 2019, with the base being completed in 2024. So, in a mere 16 years, the U.S. plans to have its moon base up and operational (with astronauts living there for 6-month shifts, like the Int’l Space Station).

Mind you now that the U.S. is actually not the only country with its sights set on the lunar real estate market. China has plans to have a moon base of its own, in a competitive timeframe to the U.S.’, with moon landings and numerous other missions in the next 15-20 years leading up to it. In addition, never being ones to get left behind, the Russians are getting into the act, planning (according to one article) to have a base up around 2025, and according to another planning to have a mine up (for the Earth-rare, but Moon-common fuel resource Helium-3) on the Moon by 2020.

And we’re just getting started! Japan’s base is planned to be operational by 2030, and even the Swedes have had plans in the works.

So that’s no less than five different countries that could have bases on the moon within a mere 25 years (!).

In the 1950′s and 60′s, we had the ‘Space Race’. Now, in the early millenium, it looks like the world is gearing itself up for a ‘Base Race’.

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