Finally someone who is respected speaks out about the lunar He-3 balloney.... (of course the Russians didn't invent the Moonscam either -- we've had plenty of it here in the west)
Hard to believe that people are still trying to sell space exploration of He3, with all the serious studies that have been done which have pointed out the difficulties and downright wishful thinking that must go into any such proposal.
Far better to sell it on SSPS or asteroid mining -especially for platinum group and precious metals. We know many ways around the difficulties of mining and refining these out of stony and metallic asteroids and there's a definite market right now. Not to mention asteroid impact mitigation while we're about mining asteoids...
I think it's also arguable that there's a whole lot less infrastructure that would need to be lifted into place to do asteroid resources mining than mining He3. Many fewer unanswered questions especially when He3 requires that we solve the unanswerable questions about breakthroughs in fusion even if we had free He3 sitting here now.
I'd rather hear about LEO hotels than this, if we're looking for a market. Maybe global package and passenger transport via sub-orbitals -that's a big one, and it was totally overlooked in the interest in the X-Prize winning flight.
I notice that permanent.com doesn't seem to even mention He3.
__________________
"A devotee of Truth may not do anything in deference to convention. He must always hold himself open to correction, and whenever he discovers himself to be wrong he must confess it at all costs and atone for it."
Monhandas K. Gandhi