Re: US Intuitive Machines set for second moon landing in February

And a whole lot of helium-3.

John Larkin doesn't know enough to realise that the business might be exploiting resources that might not be available anywhere else

John Larkin can understand the need for air and water. He less well-informed about more exotic resources, and incapable of learning what they might be.

Everything I've read about fusion power states that to start it an immense amount of power is required. How are you going to get that power source to the moon? And if you can do that, why not use that to provide lunar power needs? Or is it that you're going to do something like charge a large bank of capacitors from solar cells on the moon? How are you going to get those capacitors and solar cells to the moon? And so on.

By the way, whoever wrote that abstract didn't bother checking it: "... from 3He, fusion power can be provided to terrestrial electrical needs and to interplanetary travel." Did they /really/ mean "terrestrial" electrical needs? Or did they intend to say "lunar" electrical needs?

You might also like to consider a couple of comments from

"...Gerald Kulcinski at the University of Wisconsin-Madison is another leading proponent. He has created a small reactor at the Fusion Technology Institute, but so far it has not been possible to create the helium fusion reaction with a net power output."

"Not everyone is in agreement that Helium 3 will produce a safe fusion solution. In an article entitled "Fears over Factoids" in 2007, the theoretical physicist Frank Close famously described the concept as "moonshine"."

Then you haven't read much. Cold fusion wouldn't take much power at all, if it worked.

We do have an unlimited supply of people willing to express opinions about stuff they known very little about. Some - like Cursitor Doom - seem to search out the most fatuous misinformation they can find and repost that.

https://hb11.energy/ is perhaps also moonshine, but they do seem to be attracting investors. Boron-hydrogen fusion does have the advantage of not generating neutrons, so the hardware would last a lot longer if they ever got it to work (and the prospects are rather better than they are for cold fusion).

The He3 concentration in moon dirt is estimated at up to 15 PPB, and conjectured that it could hit 50 PPB in some places.

One would have to sift through a lot of dirt to get a gram of He3, and you'd need robots, not human miners with picks and wheelbarrows.

Even if He3 fusion worked, mining it on the moon and shipping it back to earth would probably be a huge net loser.

But NASA is in the business of losing money. They are always loooking for ways to do that better.

Is that the best you can do? You'll get a reputation for trolling, or perhaps you've got a signed picture of Fleischmann and Pons on your wall.

Perhaps you'd like to predict when /you/ think that fusion energy will become commercially available, and what form it will take. That should be easy enough as you obviously know a lot about fusion energy.

Cold Fusion is mostly bad calorimetry.

But really, Sloman has declared you to be ignorant, so back off and beg forgiveness.

To be fair they were perfectly good electrochemists but out of their depth where calorimetry was concerned. I'm still just about prepared to believe that they really did see something very odd but irreproducible.

They published prematurely for fear of another real muon catalysed cold fusion method stealing their thunder. Unwisely as it turned out.

You couldn't buy palladium or heavy water for months after their paper was first published since everybody and their dog had a go at it. No-one else could make it work although some are still trying.

I predict that fusion power will be commercially viable in about 50 years from now (according to its proponents looking for venture capital) and also that this prediction is time invariant.

This is progress! It used to be 30 years in the future.

Joe Gwinn

When I was I was post-doc in the Southampton University Chemistry Department from 1973 to 1975, Fleischmann was the professor of electrochemistry. I didn't have anything to do with him, but I knew some of his graduate students and post-docs, and Fleischmann clearly wasn't any kind of flake.

I know quite enough to know that predicting when nuclear fusion will become a commercially viable energy source isn't something anybody could do at the moment. We do have this nuclear fusion reactor at the centre of the solar system, and it is providing all the energy we use, some of it captured by plants a few hundred million years ago.

It seems likely that we will eventually find a way of fusing light elements locally to serve as a controllable local energy source, and people are exploring a lot of possibilities, but predicting if any of the ones we are currently looking at will pan out is pure guesswork, and it's always possible that somebody will find a new approach which will wipe the floor with everybody else.

What is obvious is that it is a promising area in which to look.

John Larkin really is ignorant, and I call him on it a lot, and he resents it (he should try to get less ignorant, but vanity prevents him from recognising how ignorant he is).

I was twitting Jeff Layman for being less precise than he might have been - he clearly isn't ignorant - but John Larkin has once again projected his own resentment.

It's not progress. "Thirty years in the future" and "fifty years in the future" are just an expression of the opinion that fusion power will eventually be viable but we don't know when. The numbers don't signify anything more than "not all that soon".

Picks, shovels and wheelbarrows wouldn't make a lot of sense on a airless world,and any sensible person would heat the rock in a closed chamber and pump out any helium gas that came off.

The assumption would be that you'd use it up up there.

It may look that way if you lack the wit to realise what they are actually doing, and the imagination to realise that some of what they are doing could actually be useful.

A friend worked on fusion power at LLNL starting 44 years ago.

He espouses:

A) When a "breakthrough" is in the news, that means someone's research grant is up for renewal.

B) Fusion power is always 30 years away; it's a constant of the universe like pi, or e, etc.

It was 30 years away when he started working on it, and 30 when he left, and it still is.