There May Be a Quadrillion Dollars Lying About on the Moon

Photo by Rachel Moore on Unsplash

The solar wind sweeps out from the Sun in every direction. The Earth is protected from this sleet of particles and energy by the magnetic field that surrounds the planet. The Moon enjoys no such protection. For the last three billion years it has been bombarded by the particle laden breeze, hence the presence of Helium-3 on the Moon. 

Helium-3 or He3, it turns out, can make nuclear fusion a much more efficient process. How much He3 is there? There is an estimated one million metric tons trapped in lunar soil worth about 3 billion dollars per ton.  What!? This is based on the energy it would produce at current prices. That turns out to be three quadrillion dollars, but if fusion were commercially implemented prices would drop, right? So, I reduced the value for the title of the article. Keep in mind, however, the He3 allows fusion to take place without spitting out a bunch of neutrons that create high levels of radiation. This means smaller, even mobile fusion reactors can be built. I may be off a bit to discount it the value by 2/3. Still, wars have been fought over less. 

Now, lo and behold, not only the U.S. but China, Russia, India, and Europe are planning Moon missions. North Korea and South Korea are thinking about it. Israel’s Moon mission has already begun, launching February 21 of this year. 

Great way to carry your groceries; + trash, dirty clothes, food prep waste, garden clippings, used cat litter, dirty diapers, recycling, etc. 

This is one of the greatest opportunities of our lifetimes. Nuclear fusion will be accomplished and it won’t be thirty years from now. It will be half that. Those willing to act on this will make Apple’s and Google’s fortunes pale in comparison. The great part is you don’t have to know anything about nuclear fusion to participate in this. NASA is begging for technology to be provided by private industry. So far it is the typical stuff - parts of the Lunar Orbital Platform/Gateway, Moon landers and rovers, logistical vehicles. 

As the mapping of resources on the Moon proceeds it will become more and more obvious how much is there. Not only is there He3. There is water, an invaluable space commodity. It can be used for drinking, cleaning, growing things, rocket fuel, and radiation shielding. Currently it is currently worth about $7,200 per gallon in space. There is one more thing that no one is talking about but it is still there - the 3 trillion kilotons of asteroid material that has collected there over the last 3 billion years. Yes, all of that 3 trillion kilotons of asteroid material, the He3, and the water. Now do you see why everyone wants to go to the Moon, and why the timeline for commercial fusion is not that critical?

There is a problem. All of that wealth, except maybe the water, is distributed evenly on the Moon’s 39 million square kilometers. There is no way it will be mapped completely from orbit. It will require remotely operated and semi-autonomous drones crawling around on the Moon looking for this stuff. These drones should have all the necessary detectors needed plus armor and weapons if the salient countries don’t come up with a treaty on how this wealth is to be divided. Once located, will it just be scooped up and transported to a central processing center or will a processing unit come to the site? Either way, the final product has to be taken to a lunar location or hauled into space and used there or transported back to Earth. Water will never be transported back to Earth, and a surprising amount of the recovered metal may stay on the Moon or in space to build stuff. Most of the He3 will be shipped to Earth, but some will stay on the Moon to run fusion reactors or loaded into interplanetary or even intergalactic probes carrying small fusion reactors. 

Plastic grocery bags prefer this as their second career.

Now, re-read the above paragraph and extrapolate the number of devices and logistic vehicles and processing plants and gizmos that are going to be required to do this: Prospecting drones, lunar backhoes, regolith haulers, low gravity material processors that operate in a vacuum, ore furnaces, robotic handlers, surface to orbit shuttles, pre-fab camps for humans, software to control it all. The individuals and companies that start to plan on how to do this and begin working out the details of how all this equipment will be designed will have a jump on billions of dollars worth of revenue. They will also have a jump on the next phase of this process - the 150 million asteroids in the inner Solar System. 

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What Will the Post Fusion World Look Like?

Photo by Drew McKechnie on Unsplash

Fusion energy technology may happen very soon now - possibly a decade or two. The advantages are an abundant fuel source that will last a million years, no CO2 emissions, very efficient (4 million times that of burning coal), no long term radiation risk, and no chance of a meltdown. We would hope it is cheaper. That will be determined by how much the plants cost and their lifespan and maintenance.

Let’s assume the promise of cheap energy is true, and it is equably distributed. What will it mean to our society? Let’s look back at the last occurrence of cheap energy available to the world in abundance. This was when oil was being discovered all over the world. It gushed from the ground in such quantity, it was arbitrarily assigned an initial value of $2 per barrel. It spurred the development of the internal combustion engine to power cars, trains, ships, and planes. That, in turn, created our modern world and advanced our standard of living by leaps and bounds. 

So, would cheap electrical energy simply replace all combustion engine power with electric motors? No. It would not. For cars and planes and ships, there would have to be batteries involved. We are already seeing rare earth elements and other material for battery production become a bottleneck in the supply chain, and we haven’t even begun to switch over to electric. 

Unless there is a major breakthrough in battery technology, we will go to a hydrogen economy. The cheap electricity will be used in hydrolysis to separate hydrogen and oxygen. There are two ways hydrogen can then be used. 

1. We will burn the hydrogen in combustion engines. The products of that production are water and trace amounts of nitrogen oxides. Even with major breakthroughs in battery technology, hydrogen might be cheaper because it involves only high-pressure tanks. These can be made from carbon fiber and hold thousands of pounds of pressure safely. 

2. The other option is to run the hydrogen through a fuel cell. This generates electricity that turns the motor. It is more efficient than a combustion engine running hydrogen, but it generates a lot of heat and is heavy. These last two qualifiers may prevent the use in airplanes, one of our worst CO2 producers. 

Whichever way we decide to use the cheap electricity produced by nuclear fusion, it will be a big plus for the world economy, not to mention the environment. Production costs will go down so that wages will go further. Quality of life will rise. Sunshine, lollipops, and rainbows everywhere! Okay, maybe not that great. Clean drinking water and a calamity free food supply for eight billion will be the next hurdles. Let’s hope someone has a tech trick up their sleeve for those as well. 

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The Space Habitat Revisited and Revised

Are Seeds of Conflict Brewing Over the  Moon?

Just What Are NASA’s Plans Under Trump

Thruster On a Chip: An Alternative Rocket Science That Could Revolutionize Space Travel

Oumuamua: Alien Probe or Asteroid? It Could Be Both

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Photo by Taton Moïse on Unsplash

The year is 2107 and mankind has begun to mine the asteroids. A small habitat houses 10,000 people that live and work in space, have families, and raise kids. 

Solar cells and fabricated panels are still made on Earth and are highly prized in space. The only supplier of solar panels (who paid Earth-based governments for the monopoly) to the coterie of companies in space keeps raising prices, and the orbiting crowd is  tired of it. They boycott the solar panels. There are, however, pressing energy requirements for ongoing projects in orbit. Are they screwed? Is there an alternative? 

Assuming there is no nuclear fusion technology (at that point in the future, it is only 30 years away) there is still an alternative. Steam power. Don’t laugh. Disclaimer: This is not a steampunk story. Okay, maybe a little since it’s in the title.

Use those plastic grocery bags again. Save money. Save the world. Here’s how. 

Steam may be the most cost-efficient way to power a space habitat. Outer space is perfect for producing steam. Producing photovoltaic  or solar cells is pretty sophisticated fabrication requiring specialized equipment and a particular type of silicon. Not saying it can’t be done in outer space but think how much easier it would be to use steam. 

Steampunk Modernism

Photo by Scott Webb on Unsplash

It would, basically, be a metal coil in sunlight producing steam that’s sent to the turbine, comes out of the turbine and goes to a condensing coil shaded from the Sun. The steam turns back into water, and the process starts again. The turbine would be located all snug in the habitat spinning its generator while the coils are out in space. A steam power utility station could also be built as a stand alone unit to be towed to wherever electric power is needed in space. 

This is, essentially, how the ISS maintains its inner temperature. A water coil in the ISS soaks up heat, then goes outside to a shaded coil that radiates the heat into space. When the space station is in sunlight, things on the outside can heat up to 250 degrees F, while in Earth’s shadow it can get down to -250 degrees F. These extreme temperatures can affect the inhabitants, despite very good insulation. This is why some system for temperature stability is needed. 

A large steam turbine is about 50% efficient while a photovoltaic cell is currently about 20% efficient, although that’s a bit moot considering how much solar energy is available in space. But what about the turbine itself? If solar cells can’t be made, why would a steam turbine be any different? By this time, 3D printing in space will be a given. Masonry type items made from powdered asteroid, plastics made from methane ice, and asteroid metal ranging from mild steel to high-temperature stuff like inconel will be just some of the things that can be printed out. Many parts of the habitat itself will have been 3D printed. The design for the turbine could be uploaded from a number of companies on Earth willing to make money on blueprints they have had laying around for over a hundred years. 

Also, by this time there should be plenty of water mined from asteroids to use for such a project. Unless there is a catastrophic leak or break in the system, the water can be used over and over forever. To get the steam temperature up to useful working pressures, a few hundred pounds per square inch, mirrors would be required to multiply the radiation striking the coils. Also, some insulation and heat tracing may be necessary for the condensing coil to keep from freezing up. Here is a schematic of how such a system might work. 

Click image to enlarge. Drawing by Glen Hendrix.

So there it is. Once again the forces of good and human ingenuity have conquered evil, greedy bastards out to make a fortune off of someone else’s tight situation. If it were only always that easy. 

Postscript: 

Apparently I'm not the only one thinking about this.

Researchers develop a steam-powered spacecraft that can hop between asteroids

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Mineraleater - deviant art

People who really think about mankind as eventually becoming a space-born civilization have realized the importance of the Moon for a long time. The Moon stabilizes the tilt and wobble of the Earth. The high tides it produces could have jump-started and accelerated the beginning of life and evolution. It’s probably absorbed its share of big rocks that would have otherwise hit the Earth. More importantly, for space travel, it represents an anchor and jumping off place for further exploration of our Solar System. We can put things in orbit around the Moon that we might be uncomfortable putting into a near Earth orbit - things like big chunks of asteroid or even a whole one. It can safely orbit the Moon while we mine the goodies from its innards, leaving a potential space habitat shell after it is mined out. It can provide gravity for industrial processes that simply can't be done in micro-gravity or or complete weightlessness. 

Saving the world one plastic grocery bag at a time. Recycling genius. 

Yet, after the Moon shots of the late 60s and through the 70s, the Moon seemed sort of ho-hum. America has been there, done that. It turns out we should have been much more interested in going back with the idea of establishing at least a semi-permanent basecamp. Luckily, there’s been enough interest in the Moon since then to discover that there is water and helium-3 on the surface of the Moon, perhaps a lot of both.

Moon habitat galley mockup - courtesy Wikimedia

The water is very important to mankind’s quest to explore the rest of the Solar System. It represents rocket fuel (hydrogen & oxygen), radiation shielding for spacecraft, and you can drink it and grow stuff with it. Don’t forget ice sculptures. The main thing is that it is in a much shallower gravity well than Earth water, which makes it easier and cheaper to get into space where it will be used. 

Moon Colony - courtesy Wikipedia

The helium-3, it turns out, can make nuclear fusion a much more efficient process. How much is there? There is an estimated one million metric tons trapped in lunar soil worth about 3 billion dollars per ton. What!? Wars have been fought over less. 

This is not to mention; okay, yes, I’m mentioning it; the millions of years the Moon’s surface has been bombarded by the very asteroids our nascent asteroid mining industry purports to want to go mine. That material has been laying there on the Moon’s surface undiminished all this time. Maybe this idea just occurred to a number of people all over the world at the same time. Why? Not sure, but ....

Now, lo and behold, not only the U.S. but China, Russia, India, Europe, and Israel are planning Moon missions. North and South Korea are thinking about it. Go figure. Is it really in the interest of science, or is it a game of finders keepers? The reality of nuclear fusion is always 30 years in the future according to the fusion energy mavens, but reality is catching up with everybody on everything. Artificial Intelligence is advancing quicker than nuclear fusion, and when it - a general AI, not some savant - happens, there will be advances in a lot of ideas that are on the cusp. Those that weren’t smart enough to realize the worth of the Moon for it’s natural gravity harbor properties are smart enough to realize the tremendous wealth, energy, and power now represented by the Moon. 

Let us hope all that wealth and power does not attract those who simply want wealth and power for its own sake. Let us hope it attracts those with the vision to use that wealth and power for the betterment of all mankind rather than a privileged few. Let us also hope all parties involved can figure out a peaceful means of dividing up resources on the Moon. Fingers crossed.

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Artificial Intelligence and Asteroid Mining Will Be a (Necessary) Match Made In the Heavens

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Oumuamua: Alien Probe or Asteroid? It Could Be Both

Oumuamua - courtesy NASA

Oumuamua is the strange cigar-shaped interstellar interloper that Harvard University professors think may be an alien probe sent to gather information on our Solar System. Slight changes in acceleration and direction have been given as reasons for this hypothesis. The theory is that it is the remnants of a “light sail” powered a now defunct alien probe. Oumuamua is Hawaiian for “scout”. 

SETI senior astronomer Seth Shostak thinks Oumuamua is just another comet or asteroid from very far away, as in another star system. That explains its unusually large velocity and its path directly through the Solar System. Comets and asteroids are known to vent gas, which acts like a thruster on a space ship to change direction, speed up, or slow down. Other scientists are skeptical as well.

I agree with Seth. It would be highly unlikely for the first chunk of material we’ve spotted from outside our Solar System to be an alien probe. Although it is much more elongated than other asteroids, it should not be construed to be a derelict light sail. It should be pointed out how likely it is that an alien probe would take on the form of an asteroid because it may actually be a hollowed out asteroid. Why is that? Convenience. 

Use those plastic grocery bags again. Save Money. Save the world. Here's how.

Think about what our civilization is currently planning to do. We are going to mine the asteroids. So far, we are only thinking about mining the asteroids, but it will happen. We are running out of stuff on Earth, and there’s plenty of just about everything in space. The asteroid belt is a busted up planet, and it has the same materials we have here on Earth. 

A number of things are in collusion to boost asteroid mining. Nuclear fusion is about to happen. The helium-3 on the Moon will represent the outer space version of the gold rush for its ability to facilitate the fusion process. A NASA space station is currently planned for the Moon. As the helium-3 rush commences, a space elevator will be built on the Moon. Also, AI will come into its own, powering autonomous drones the asteroid mining industry will require to prospect and gut asteroids for a very fine profit. AI will also advance biomedical engineering and research, taking longevity in humans to biblical levels, making longer term projects more acceptable. 

All these things will come together in a very short time to initiate and accelerate asteroid mining. These mountains of minerals and metals orbit the Sun. Some of their orbits coincide with both Earth and Mars. Once these asteroids are mined, they can be outfitted with AI pilot navigators, living quarters, and science labs and used as comfortable, safe, fuel-free shuttles between here and Mars. They are safe because their mass protects against minor collisions and hard cosmic radiation. 

Want to go somewhere else? Stick a fusion drive on the asteroid powered by asteroid material and a little helium-3. Now, when it gets to Mars orbit, just keep going and explore the asteroid belt. If someone living in the asteroid belt were to see this spaceship, they would know it came from outside the belt because it is going a different direction and velocity than most everything else, just like we know Oumuamua came from outside the Solar System. It would seem a logical thing that this is what spacefaring races do when they get to a certain technological level. They mine asteroids and leave an outer shell to be converted to a spaceship, instead of hauling all that material out of some gravity well to build a ship.

This asteroid conversion scheme could be ramped up to hollow out big asteroids and turn them into large explorer vessels capable of going to nearby stars and checking out exoplanets for possible colonization. Fifty years ago Harvard’s paper on Oumuamua would be scoffed at as total science fiction created by hippy scientists smoking pot. With what we know is about to happen in this day and age, it still seems unlikely as a light sail but plausible as a probe. Fifty years from now, some researcher will run across that Harvard paper and laugh as he stubs out a joint in the recreation room of the Ceres Flyer, a converted asteroid riding a fusion flame to Alpha Centauri.

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Why It Is a Certainty We Will Become a Space-Based Civilization

Asteroid Mining - How to Pick the Right Asteroid

Recycling Asteroids For Fun and Profit

Taking the 06-03-25 Asteroid Shuttle to Mars - An Alternative to Planned Mars Missions

A Heavy Metal, Cannibalistic Asteroid Propulsion System

Sticking the Landing On Your Billion Dollar Asteroid

Artificial Intelligence and Asteroid Mining Will Be a (Necessary) Match Made In the Heavens

The Weapon of Mass Destruction Nobody Is Talking About

How We Can Diminish the Possibility of Water Wars

There's An Asteroid Out There With All of Our Names On It

What Will Be the Most Common Currency In a Future Space-Based Society?

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Recycling Asteroids For Fun and Profit

Asteroids

You did it! You raised $5 billion dollars to mine an asteroid and did just that. They didn’t think you could, but $10 billion for immediate delivery of iron, platinum, nickel, and water to the orbiting habitat project just cleared your bank with an agreement to supply another $10 billion worth of material over the next 15 years. 

Paper bags take 5 X the water to make and 7 X the fuel to transport than plastic bags 

Now what to do with a mined-out asteroid? 

Asteroid being worked on.

Careful programming of the mining drones left tunnels in concentric circular paths around the axis of the asteroid. It spins around that axis, producing .75 artificial gravity in the tunnel nearest the surface. It still has a lot of equipment on it, including a used coil gun/ mass driver propulsion system with enough iron left to run it for another 300 years. Ice storage systems are intact and some water left entrained in rock, about half a cubic mile. A 200 feet diameter repair bay has been cut a quarter mile deep in one end with a space tug parked in the center on tensioned cables. The bay is connected by airlock to the pressurized habitat portion of the asteroid that all those mining tunnels have been turned in to. Several side caverns are packed with deep space drones of various capability. The crown jewel is the new fusion reactor for those dark, cold times out in the asteroid belt when the Sun gets too weak to make those solar panels work efficiently.

Why so much equipment and careful design for a mined-out asteroid? 

Highly modified asteroid.

The Swiss government has just rented the asteroid for its next two laps around the Sun, about two and a half years, for deep space studies of the asteroid belt and a flyby of Mars to deliver supplies to the Scandinavian colony there. That rent means another $750 million dollars; half Swiss Francs, half Aquacoin (the water based cryptocurrency used in space); into the bank account. And you thought RV rentals were outrageous. Actually, it’s quite cheap for what they’re getting, but you have ulterior motives. While the Swiss are doing their studies, your prospecting drones will be cataloguing more asteroids in the belt with the idea of finding another worth mining. The Swiss know this. All deals are transparent in space.

Astronauts putting net on asteroid.

This scenario presupposes some technological developments that may or may not take place over the next few decades. Practical nuclear fusion is, obviously, the biggest hurdle. The artificial intelligence to run autonomous drones is another. Once those technologies are up and running, recycling mined-out asteroids into Solar System spanning space ships will be no problem. They have a built-in radiation shield. Spun up, they have artificial gravity. Those are two of the big problems in navigating long distances in deep space. 

Asteroid miner drone.

There is one sneaky, ill-perceived technological hurdle to be overcome to make this series of future events likely. The human aging problem must be solved. Humans need to live longer in order to take on the kind of projects needed to become a spacefaring species. Humans need to live in good physical condition for 150 to 200 years after adolescence and before declining into old age. Not only will it make such projects more likely, it will force humanity into a longer view of the future. We will start taking care of the planet, recycling to the max, planning for the far future. Why? Because now it’s personal. You no longer need the kids and grandkids as an excuse to do good things for the future. Do it for yourself! You’re going to be there. 

It costs $4000 to recycle ton of plastic bags worth $500 on open market. 

Back to asteroids. At some point, someone is going to get brave and break that asteroid out of its natural orbit with the propulsion drive, start using planets and moons as gravity slings, and really start exploring our Solar System. It’s a big place. People could be on missions that last decades exploring the moons of Jupiter and the rings of Saturn. I wonder what the science fiction of those times will be like.

Other articles you may enjoy:

Oumuamua: Alien Probe or Asteroid? It Could Be Both

Cryptocurrency Is Going Into Space

Going Back To the Moon Is Not Just for Governments Anymore

Why It Is a Certainty We Will Become a Space-Based Civilization

Asteroid Mining - How to Pick the Right Asteroid

Taking the 06-03-25 Asteroid Shuttle to Mars - An Alternative to Planned Mars Missions

A Heavy Metal, Cannibalistic Asteroid Propulsion System

Sticking the Landing On Your Billion Dollar Asteroid

Artificial Intelligence and Asteroid Mining Will Be a (Necessary) Match Made In the Heavens

The Weapon of Mass Destruction Nobody Is Talking About

How We Can Diminish the Possibility of Water Wars

There's An Asteroid Out There With All of Our Names On It

What Will Be the Most Common Currency In a Future Space-Based Society?

Workers In Space Will Live In Igloos

How We Will Get Asteroid Material Back To Earth

The Military Values High Ground - Space Is the Highest

Very Large Scale 3D Printing In Space

Energy and Space; Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum

China’s Strategy for the Future Is Scary Smart

We Will Live on the Moon: the How and Why

Workers In Space Will Live In Igloos

Courtesy Kordite at flickr

The mining of asteroids will begin in earnest within the next 10 to 100 years. The asteroids chosen for retrieval and processing will almost certainly contain water because water will be one of the most valuable commodities in space, if not the most valuable. Not only does water contain hydrogen and oxygen for rocket fuel, humans need it for survival; and it is very efficient at stopping many types of radiation. 

If a current or future corporation is going to make a decision on which asteroid to go after, the metal content of the asteroid may not be the deciding factor. Asteroids with little or no water will be passed up for mining at least in the early phase of the industry. If our civilization remains technically and economically viable into the 22nd century, the asteroid mining industry should be hitting its stride and keeping economic growth positive for several hundred years. Even after this maturation, the industry will favor those space rocks containing water simply out of habit and tradition unless some special material is needed that can’t be found in combination with water. Another outlier would be a leap in engine technology, such as a compact fusion drive, that would mediate the reliance on water as stored rocket fuel.

Use those plastic grocery bags again. Save money. Save the world. Here’s how. 

Let’s say some future company is evaluating two different asteroids for mining. One, 1999 JM8, is a nickel, cobalt, and iron asteroid worth $45 trillion dollars. It is fairly large at 4.35 miles in diameter, but only .024 Astronomical Units away at its closest approach to Earth, approximately 2.2 million miles or about ten times the distance from the Earth to the Moon.

Another asteroid, 1950 KA, is worth only $33.4 trillion dollars and is .097 AU at its closest pass to Earth, nearly four times that of 1999 JM8. It has a couple of things going for it, though. It is only 2.17 miles in diameter and has a composition of nickel, iron, cobalt, water, nitrogen, hydrogen, and ammonia. 

This company will pick 1950 KA because of the water, hands down. Once the robotic retrieval craft gets to 1950 KA, it can mine water; and, with the abundant solar energy available in space, split it into hydrogen and oxygen for rocket fuel to move that mass back to Earth.

Courtesy NASA

After 1950 KA is parked in orbit near Earth in one of the Lagrange points L4 or L5, the real fun begins. Using many specially designed, semi-autonomous robots, the asteroid is scraped, tunneled, bored, melted, smelted, hammered, drilled and crushed to extract its treasures. In the early going of asteroid mining, however, it will not be done without humans. We will be there to direct the overall strategy and change tactics when necessary, not to mention repairs and hands-on inspections. This is only because artificial intelligence will not yet be up to the autonomous decision making required of mining asteroids. 

Plastic grocery bags prefer this as their second career. 

Human workers need a safe, even comfortable place to stay while performing these chores. Safe by logical necessity and comfortable to attract the type of person needed for this work given how long they will have to be in space. Money can only go so far as an incentive. Intelligent, athletic, engineering and scientific types only need apply, similar to astronauts in education and ability. 

Here is where the water comes in. These people will be shielded from radiation by a wall of water, actually ice. As I mentioned above, water is very efficient at shielding many types of radiation, including that from solar flares, gamma radiation, and cosmic radiation. Although NASA has been working on a lightweight polyethylene plastic called RFX1, it has some serious problems in competing with water. One, you can’t drink it. Two, it has to be hauled up the gravity well of Earth. 

Exactly how will water be used as a radiation shield? Three feet of water or ice will intercept and diffuse almost any radiation, including gamma rays and cosmic rays. Since there is plenty of water available from the asteroid, it makes sense to protect the entire facility instead of providing a vault or other safe area that people have to go to. At some point, an unexpected sleet of radiation is bound to sweep through the area. This way everyone will be protected all the time unless they are doing something outside of the habitat and not working inside the asteroid.

The geometry of the habitat will resemble a thick hockey puck. This will rotate to provide simulated gravity to the inhabitants. On the unit shown in the drawings, eight rotations per minuted will provide nearly one g at the outer wall or "lower" level. The second level will provide three quarter g, and the "upper" level one half g. The center on one side will have a docking facility. The center of the other side will sprout a boom about as long as twice the diameter of the pancake. At the end of this boom will be thrusters that can point in almost any direction. These thrusters will be powered by, you guessed it, electrolysed water in the form of hydrogen and oxygen burning to form, once again, water.

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Not only is it a habitat, but it can move around as required to view different parts of the asteroid or move equipment that is not self-motile. It will pick up and drop off people at the orbital end of the Lunar Space Elevator. It will be a habitat, taxi, and tug. Some may call it the "Ice Palace", but it’s a given the majority will nickname it the "Igloo."

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This three foot barrier of water will remain frozen because space is cold. Solar energy hitting the outside envelope of the vessel may have some effect, but as that surface rotates into shadow, it will become frozen again. The inside surface of the ice barrier will be in a constant state of melting. The human habitation will necessarily give off heat. No matter how thick the insulation, it will eventually melt this inner surface. This water, through centripetal forces will be routed to the outer surface where it will be refrozen. This ice barrier is a good buffer between the 70-75 degrees Fahrenheit in the habitat and the minus 450 degrees F. of outer space and will probably vary in temperature, getting colder from the inner to outer surfaces.

The lure of infinite wealth and energy will be too strong for capital to resist. A lot of money will be spent on this endeavor. Hopefully, it will be spent wisely, and progress will be swift and beneficial not only for those companies involved but for the rest of us as well. The bottleneck is the gravity well barrier that is currently so expensive to vault. Space is kind of like Vegas; what happens there stays there. However, companies like Obayashi Corporation are working on building an elevator to space. This would drastically reduce the cost of sending stuff into orbit and bringing it back. Their plan is to have it built by 2050, waiting only for the successful mass production of carbon nanotube fibers long enough to use. Hopefully, their prediction will not become similar to the refrain of nuclear fusion developers of having a practical fusion generator within thirty years … every year. While the industry can have some success with rockets, it will grow by leaps and bounds with a working space elevator.

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