The most important resource on the Moon

They have found phosphate on the moon, and it is one more piece of the puzzle of the composition of the moon, but what things can we find on the moon, this discovery of phosphate is very interesting, but there are much more interesting things that could even be make profitable.

The creation of lunar bases and the mining exploitation of the moon, on the moon there are mineral resources similar to those on earth, similar, there is no oil or coal, but for example there is iron, in particular it is believed that there may be rich metal deposits in the magnetic anomalies that have been detected on the moon.

There is titanium that can be alloyed with iron, aluminum and vanadium and that is also on the moon and in this way create alloys to build tools, structures and spacecraft, there is silicon that is of enormous importance to produce arrays of solar panels and thus obtain energy from the sun, it is also necessary to create fiberglass glass and a wide variety of useful ceramics, on the moon there is also calcium, magnesium and there are also rare earths although in smaller quantities than on Earth.

Rare earths is the common name for a set of elements necessary to manufacture many of the technological equipment that we currently use and there is also helium 3 from the solar wind, this is a very curious element and can be a very important and key element, because on Earth it is extremely scarce, since it comes from the solar wind and it turns out that the Earth's magnetic field that protects us from the solar wind has the secondary effect of preventing it from reaching the surface of the Earth.

Helium 3 reaches the moon because there is no magnetic field and after billions of years of solar wind bombardment it is estimated that there are at least more than a million tons of helium 3 on the surface of the moon and it is as interesting because it is one of the ingredients in one of the recipes to achieve fusion energy, fusion energy pursues the ideal of uniting hydrogen atoms as stars do, it would be a clean and practically infinite energy since hydrogen can be extracted of water and it would also be the energy that would open the doors to space exploration, since hydrogen is the most common element in the universe and it would be easy to find it to produce energy for our ships, our colonies, machines or whatever.

If it is necessary to explore beyond Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune or Uranus, we cannot use solar energy or classic nuclear energy, the problem is that the radioactive batteries run out, uranium or plutonium would have to be extracted and they are complicated elements to find. on Earth as well as off it, however, hydrogen on Saturn there are a lot of moons that are covered in water ice, it would simply be enough to break those water molecules and we would have hydrogen and oxygen and the hydrogen would serve for those fusion reactors and We could then expand our exploration beyond Jupiter, Neptune's Saturn and even to other stars.

The problem is that the ideal of joining two hydrogen atoms is not easy, the main recipe currently uses deuterium and tritium which are isotopes of hydrogen, an isotope is an atom with a different number of neutrons, deuterium is hydrogen but its nucleus is formed by a proton and a neutron and tritium has a proton and two neutrons in its nucleus. Tritium has problems. It turns out that this tritium is a scarce element. The worst thing about it is that it is radioactive. When a reactor melts down, deuterium With tritium, helium 4 is produced, which is a stable element. Helium 4 is harmless. You can even use it to fill balloons at a party, but in the fusion process, a dangerous high-energy neutron is produced, so this recipe for deuterium and tritium has its problems.

There is an alternative recipe and it is to replace the radioactive tritium, which I already said is also scarce and difficult to obtain, with helium 3, which is scarce and we would have to go look for it on the moon, but with helium 3 in this recipe, we would have solved the problem of radioactive contamination and also solved the problem of the annoying high-energy neutron, but as I said to get Helium 3 you have to go to the moon.

It has been calculated that the lunar reserves of helium 3 could supply all the world's energy demand for 250 years, it would not be forever, but 250 years would give us time to improve fusion energy and achieve that ideal of hydrogen plus hydrogen, without problems and it would not be easy to extract it either since about 150 million tons of lunar dust would have to be processed to obtain one ton of helium 3, it is complicated to send machinery to the moon spacecraft establish a base processing millions of tons of lunar soil would be worth it, because Some experts believe so, because with only 25 tons of helium 3 they have calculated that all the energy needs of the United States would be covered for a year.

Helium 3 could be that economic engine that makes lunar exploration profitable, which is why some say that helium 3 is lunar gold, and as soon as it is finished on the moon in 250 years we would have the experience of extracting and processing it to go to others. planets with a larger surface area like Mercury, which is double that of the moon, there is also helium 3 on the dwarf planet Ceres and also in large asteroids, it is just there waiting for us.

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