The New Russian-Sino Energy Space Race

Back on November 2, 2005 our Smart Economy blog readers will remember reading that China was planning to mine Helium-3 on the moon in the next decade.

See Mining the moon; Will China become the New Saudi Arabia of the 21st century?

Now Russia is jumping on this new energy bandwagon.

The BBC Monitoring Former Soviet Union.  London: Jan 25, 2006 reports that Russia plans to mine the moon for this environmentally-friendly energy source .

"In the near future Russia may once again regain the right to proudly call itself a pioneer in space. We are planning to create a permanent base on the moon and use it to provide supplies of a rare helium-3 isotope. This was announced today by the head of the Energiya [aerospace] corporation, Nikolay Sevastyanov. The station on the moon should be operational by as early as 2015 and five years later it should start mining this rare isotope. According to experts, there are at least 1m tonnes of helium-3 on the moon, which is enough to meet world energy needs for 1,000 years. The Earth has only several hundred tonnes of this isotope. Helium-3 is almost the ideal fuel. It is very stable, does not explode and allows the creation of the most environmentally- friendly generators."

Credit: Channel One TV, Moscow, in Russian 2045 25 Jan 2006

From ITAR TASS:

RUSSIA is planning to mine a rare fuel on the moon by 2020 with a permanent base and a heavy-cargo transport link, a Russian space official says.

"We are planning to build a permanent base on the moon by 2015 and by 2020 we can begin the industrial-scale delivery ... of the rare isotope Helium-3," Nikolai Sevastyanov, head of the Energia space corporation, was quoted by ITAR-TASS news agency as saying at an academic conference.

The International Space Station (ISS) would play a key role in the project and a regular transport relay to the moon would be established with the help of the planned Clipper spaceship and the Parom, a space capsule intended to tug heavy cargo containers around space, Mr Sevastyanov said.

Helium-3 is a non-radioactive isotope of helium that can be used in nuclear fusion.

Rare on earth but plentiful on the moon, it is seen by some experts as an ideal fuel because it is powerful, non-polluting and generates almost no radioactive by-product.

PROS: clean, non polluting, but will it be energy efficient to export energy from the moon?

CONS: lunar pollution from open pit mining? surface scraping ? what will it do to the cost /benefit ratio of conventional nuclear power?

INTERESTING: new treaties on lunar real estate and resource exploitation will need to be negotiated; will America be playing catchup?

For an update see Sino-Russian Cooperation

© 2005-2006

Walter Derzko

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Comments

[legion]

Lunar pollution from open pit mining? Better convene a lunar town hall meeting immediately. Have the miners filed the proper environmental impact papers? Will the air and water of the moon be irreparably damaged?

But seriously now,

You left out the Indians, who claim to have plans to put an Indian Astronaut on the moon by 2008. India is staking its lunar claim along with the others. China by 2017, the US by 2015, Russia, ESA, Brazil, Iran????