To Reach for the Moon

China’s lunar program is about more than national pride. Try this: a limitless supply of clean, safe energy.

…National pride is a big force behind China’s moon program, but not the only one. The Chinese are aiming to do more than “just set up a flag or pick up a piece of rock,” says Ye Zili of China’s Space Science Society. What are they after? A limitless source of clean, safe energy to feed their voracious economy. The stable isotope helium 3 (3He), a potential fuel for nuclear fusion, was first found in moon rocks brought back by the Apollo missions. It is one constituent of the “solar wind” constantly given off by the Sun. The stuff bounces off Earth’s magnetic field, but the moon has no magnetic field, and its surface has been soaking up 3He for billions of years. If you could dig it up and put it into a fusion reactor you would get ordinary helium 4 (as in balloons), ordinary hydrogen (as in H2O) and an abundance of radioactivity-free energy. According to Gerald Kulcinski, director of the Fusion Technology Institute at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, a mere 40 tons would be roughly enough to serve America’s electrical needs for a year.
Or so the theory goes. The April mission is supposed to learn more about the distribution of 3He on the lunar surface. If significant deposits are found, China’s engineers still need to design the world’s first lunar mining machines and send them up