Helium-3 da

Helium-3 DA

Sacred Heart High School

NC (:40)

China’s Jade Rabbit lunar program prioritizes helium-3 extraction over space ILaw which prioritizes EP. Brooks 2-25 writes¹

“I know I may not make it through this lunar night.” The China Academy of Space Technology laid the pathos on thick when it gave its lunar robot Jade Rabbit a farewell speech at the end of last month. The rover had become mired in moon dust and was unable to enter hibernation. Facing 14 days without sunlight, the solar-powered robot, launched on 2 December, was unlikely to survive. “Good night, Planet Earth,” it said. “Good night, humanity.” It looked like the end of a venture that could have accelerated the process of finding out who – if anyone – owns the moon. The ultimate goal for Jade Rabbit was to bore a hole in the moon and see what moon rock is made of. That’s because the Chinese think the moon’s minerals might be worth extracting. “They are looking at feasibility for mining the moon, and they are likely to do it if there’s a strong business case,” says Richard Holdaway, director of the space division at the UK’s Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, which collaborates closely with China’s space programme. There would be nothing illegal about such an operation because international laws covering the moon are “way, way behind”, as Holdaway puts it. In theory, anyone who could manage it (and afford it) could go to the moon tomorrow, dig out a huge chunk of lunar rock, bring it back to earth and sell it off to the highest bidder. The Chinese could take the moon apart and sell it bit by bit without breaking international law. The question we have to ask ourselves is simple: do we see a need to prevent that happening? The moon’s bounty is not fanciful science fiction. “There is stuff on the moon to mine – no doubt about it,” Holdaway says. We know that minerals that are hard to find on earth, such as the “rare earth” elements and the metals titanium and uranium, are abundant up there. But the main prize is the lighter isotope of helium, known as helium-3. This gas is the critical fuel for nuclear fusion reactors, which promise an energy yield many times higher than the present generation of fission-powered reactors. Helium-3 costs roughly $10m a kilo. Though we don’t yet have commercial fusion reactors, these might not be far off. When they arrive, the demand for helium-3 will outstrip supply, and the easiest place to get more will be from moon rock. It couldn’t be easier: heat the rock and the gas comes out. It’s not just the Chinese who have ambitions in this direction. Some private companies also have their eye on lunar rock as a source of riches. Most are based in the US, and they are actively working on lunar landers that will eventually be able to perform mineral extraction. As yet, it is very hard to know whether the business case will stand up. It’s not a small endeavour to set up a factory on the moon. It is horrendously expensive to leave Planet Earth. Space on a shuttle is sold, like poultry, by weight. The cost of escaping the earth is roughly $25,000 per kilo. Anyone paying that kind of money upfront needs strong guarantees that the investment is worthwhile. That is why the space entrepreneur Robert Bigelow has asked the US government to nail down issues raised by who can mine the moon. “The time has come to get serious about lunar property rights,” he told a press briefing last November. Bigelow made his money in hotels and property and has decided to pursue accommodation in space as his next venture. He already has a contract to supply astronaut habitats to Nasa; he has also said he wants to build habitats on the moon and, eventually, Mars. That plan, he argues, will be compromised unless issues of lunar ownership are clarified. Two treaties cover the beyond-earth behaviour of nations and private companies. The oldest is the Outer Space Treaty of 1967. It says that “the exploration and use of outer space … shall be carried out for the benefit and in the interests of all countries … and shall be the province of all mankind”. The agreement wasn’t drawn up to deal with questions of property rights, however. “It strictly prohibits claims by sovereign nations, but it does not expressly prohibit private entities from claiming private property rights,” says Michael J Listner, a New Hampshire-based lawyer specialising in space policy. “Depending on who you talk to, that omission creates a loophole for private ownership rights.” One of the purposes of the treaty was to allow private companies to engage in activities in space, creating the opportunity for establishing commercial satellite networks, for instance. Back when the pact was developed, the Soviet Union argued that nation states were the only proper actors in space; the US wanted to give private companies a chance to exploit the new frontier. So, a compromise was reached: Article VI says that non-governmental organisations have to be supervised by their nation states. The treaty says nothing about those non-governmental actors claiming property rights, however. “It doesn’t prohibit them, it doesn’t allow them. It’s completely silent,” says Joanne Gabrynowicz, a professor emerita of space law at the University of Mississippi who acts as an official observer to the UN effort to oversee the legal framework governing use of space. This gaping hole in the legislation is where the 1984 Moon Agreement comes in. The United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs hosts the agreement, which states that the moon’s environment should not be disrupted, that it should be used only for peaceful purposes, “that the moon and its natural resources are the common heritage of mankind” and that “an international regime” should be established “to govern the exploitation of the natural resources of the moon when such exploitation is about to become feasible”. It sounds cut and dried: no one can own bits of the moon without further negotiations. The problem is that the seven nations which have ratified the Moon Agreement have no investment in it – they are not space-faring. “It’s considered pointless because the US, China and Russia didn’t even become a party to it,” Listner says. “If any of the three had done that, it might have been more meaningful.” Holdaway agrees: “It’s not legally binding. China could send armies of robots and humans and effectively stick a flag in the ground and say: ‘It’s ours.’ ”
Jade Rabbit’s key to space exploration – spills over to other developing countries.

Daily Galaxy 13 writes²

China launched its first ever extraterrestrial landing craft the Yutu or Jade Rabbit buggy— a solar-powered, six-wheeled vehicle similar to ones the United States has sent to Mars- into orbit. Chang'e-3 lunar probe blasted off on board an enhanced Long March-3B carrier rocket from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in China's southwestern Sichuan province at 1:30 am (1730 GMT). In two weeks, when the landing vehicle is scheduled to descend on the moon and release the Jade Rabbit, or Yutu, robotic rover to start sending back data and pictures from Sinus Iridum, or the Bay of Rainbows, a basaltic plain formed from lava that filled a crater. China's President Xi Jinping has said he wants China to establish itself as a space superpower. The mission has inspired widespread pride in China's growing technological prowess, with a goal of sending a human to the moon some time after 2020. Chinese state-run television broadcast footage of the rocket’s perfect launch and ascent into space, where the Chang’e-3 craft set off toward the moon. In 2007, China launched its first moon orbiter, the Chang'e-1 - named after a lunar goddess - which took images of the surface and analysed the distribution of elements. Now, The rover's mission will be to conduct geological surveys and search for natural resources after the probe touches down on the moon in mid-December as China's first spacecraft tt make a soft landing beyond Earth. The latest manned space mission in June, three astronauts spent 15 days in orbit and docked with an experimental space laboratory, part of Beijing's quest to build a working space station by 2020. If the lunar mission is successful, China will become the third country, after the United States and the former Soviet Union, to soft-land on the moon. Beijing stresses that its space program is for peaceful purposes. It will share the technological achievements of its manned space programme with other nations, especially developing ones, and will offer to train astronauts from other countries. “If it’s all successful, it will certainly indicate that they have really come up the learning curve in terms of technology,” said Joan Johnson-Freese, a professor of national security affairs at the United States Naval War College in Rhode Island who researches China’s space activities. Professor Johnson-Freese. “China’s getting a lot of prestige, which turns into geostrategic influence, from the fact that they are the third country to have manned spaceflight capabilities, that they are going to the moon." In 2007, Chang’e-1 blasted off from the Xichang Satellite Launch Centre, Sichuan, atop a Long March 3A rocket -the first step in the Chinese ambition to land robotic explorers on the Moon before 2020. Chang’e-1 has four year-long mission goals to accomplish. The first is to make three-dimensional images of many lunar landforms and outline maps of major lunar geological structures. This mapping will include the first detailed images taken of some regions near the lunar poles. Chang’e-1 was also designed to analyze the abundance of up to 14 chemical elements and their distribution across the lunar surface. Thirdly it measured the depth of the lunar soil and lastly explored the space weather between the Earth and the Moon. Earlier in 2007, shortly after Russia claimed a vast portion of the Arctic sea floor, accelerating an international race for the natural resources as global warming opens polar access, China has announced plans to map "every inch" of the surface of the Moon and exploit the vast quantities of Helium-3 thought to lie buried in lunar rocks as part of its ambitious space-exploration program. Ouyang Ziyuan, head of the first phase of lunar exploration, was quoted on government-sanctioned news site ChinaNews.com describing plans to collect three dimensional images of the Moon for future mining of Helium 3: "There are altogether 15 tons of helium-3 on Earth, while on the Moon, the total amount of Helium-3 can reach one to five million tons." "Helium-3 is considered as a long-term, stable, safe, clean and cheap material for human beings to get nuclear energy through controllable nuclear fusion experiments," Ziyuan added. "If we human beings can finally use such energy material to generate electricity, then China might need 10 tons of helium-3 every year and in the world, about 100 tons of helium-3 will be needed every year." Helium 3 fusion energy - classic Buck Rogers propulsion system- may be the key to future space exploration and settlement, requiring less radioactive shielding, lightening the load. Scientists estimate there are about one million tons of helium 3 on the moon, enough to power the world for thousands of years. The equivalent of a single space shuttle load or roughly 25 tons could supply the entire United States' energy needs for a year. Thermonuclear reactors capable of processing Helium-3 would have to be built, along with major transport system to get various equipment to the Moon to process huge amounts of lunar soil and get the minerals back to Earth. While this emerging international community claims it's slice of the aerospace universe, the U.S., by contrast, is no longer a leader but simply a player, according to nationally renowned astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, who points out that "we’ve moved backward just by standing still."
Space exploration solves multiple scenarios for extinction. Baum 10 writes³

Another non-market benefit of space exploration is reduction in the risk of the extinction of humanity and other Earth-originating life. Without space colonization, the survival of humanity and other Earth-originating life will become extremely difficult – perhaps impossible – over the very long term. This is because the Sun, like all stars, changes in its composition and radiative output over time. The Sun is gradually converting hydrogen into helium, thereby getting warmer. In some 500 million to one billion years, this warming is projected to render Earth uninhabitable to life as we know it [25] and [26]. Humanity, if it still exists on Earth then, could conceivably have developed technology to survive on Earth despite these radical conditions. Such technology may descend from present proposals to “geoengineer” the planet in response to anthropogenic climate change [27] and [28].2 However, later – around seven billion years later – the Sun will lose mass that spreads into Earth's orbit, causing Earth to slow, be pulled into the Sun, and evaporate. The only way life could survive on Earth would be if, by sheer coincidence (the odds are on the order of one in 105 to one in 106 [29]), the planet happened to be pulled out of the Solar System by a star system that was passing by. This process might enable life to survive on Earth much longer, although the chances of this are quite remote. While space colonization would provide a hedge against these very long-term astronomical threats, it would also provide a hedge against the more immediate threats that face humanity and other species. Such threats include nuclear warfare, pandemics, anthropogenic climate change, and disruptive technology. Because these threats would generally only affect life on Earth and not life elsewhere, self-sufficient space colonies would survive these catastrophes, enabling life to persist in the universe. For this reason, space colonization has been advocated as a means of ensuring long-term human survival [32] and [33]. Space exploration projects can help increase the probability of long-term human survival in other ways as well: technology developed for space exploration is central to proposals to avoid threats from large comet and asteroid impacts.