SO WHAT WILL IT TAKE TO ACTUALLY MAKE IT HAPPEN - BACK TO THE MOON? - LRK -

Testimony of Hon. Harrison H. Schmitt: Senate Hearing on "Lunar Exploration" | SpaceRef - Your Space Reference: "STATUS REPORT
Date Released: Thursday, November 06, 2003

Source: Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation
Testimony of Hon. Harrison H. Schmitt: Senate Hearing on 'Lunar Exploration'
RETURN TO THE MOON
A return to the Moon to stay would be at least comparable to the first permanent settlement of America if not to the movement of our species out of Africa.
I am skeptical that the U.S. Government can be counted on to make such a 'sustained commitment' absent unanticipated circumstances comparable to those of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Therefore, I have spent much of the last decade exploring what it would take for private investors to make such a commitment. At least it is clear that investors will stick with a project if presented to them with a credible business plan and a rate of return commensurate with the risk to invested capital. My colleagues at the Fusion Technology Institute of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Interlune-Intermars Initiative, Inc. believe that such a commercially viable project exists in lunar helium-3 used as a fuel for fusion electric power plants on Earth. Lunar helium-3, arriving at the Moon as part of the solar wind, is imbedded as a trace, non-radioactive isotope in the lunar soils. There is a resource base of helium-3 about of 10,000 metric tonnes just in upper three meters of the titanium-rich soils of Mare Tranquillitatis. The energy equivalent value of Helium-3 delivered to operating fusion power plants on Earth would be about $4 billion per tonne relative to today's coal. Coal, of course, supplies about half of the approximately $40 billion domestic electrical power market. "
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