Hindenburg flying over NYC an hour before the incident in New Jersey, 1937.

Well, kinda. Ish.

Right now the estimate is you would need to mine and refine 150,000 tons of regolith to get 1 gram of helium 3.

What does 150,000 tons look like? A humpback whale or jumbo jet.

How much helium 3 would it take to power the US for a year? One estimate is around 25 tons.

So...our lunar mine needs to mine and refine a jumbo jet of regolith 25 million times.

To compare this to other, MUCH less exotic mining processes, China made about 1,337 million tons of steel in 2021.

Finally, you still have to get the He3 back to earth, and make sure none of it boils off in the process.

Likely He3 would be better used in a lunar fusion research facility, but that's not likely to be made until they can show break-even on Earth, and that's always been 50 years away.

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