DOCUMENTARIES A GRATIS GLOBAL SERVICE
⌕ SEARCH GRATIS GLOBAL ↗
DOCUMENTARIES
Mining the Moon for Helium
SOURCE: VIMEO · NO TRACKING UNTIL YOU PRESS PLAY · TROUBLE PLAYING? WATCH AT THE SOURCE ↗

Mining the Moon for Helium

49 MIN · EN · STATUS: [ STREAMING ]
RATE THIS

Helium-3, a rare isotope scarce on Earth but deposited across the lunar surface by billions of years of solar wind, is the resource driving this film's case for returning to the Moon. The pitch is straightforward: helium-3 could fuel nuclear fusion reactors, producing power without the radioactive waste of conventional fission, and the Moon may hold enough of it to matter at industrial scale. Scientists and engineers lay out where the isotope sits in lunar regolith, how it might be extracted and shipped home, and why no one has done it yet. The obstacles get equal time: the cost of building mining infrastructure on another world, the technical problem of processing enormous volumes of soil for trace amounts of gas, and the unresolved question of who would own what gets dug up. The film treats lunar mining less as science fiction than as an engineering and economics problem, one that depends on fusion technology nobody has finished building yet.