Existing Commercial Potential for Helium-3 from Luna

> Current market price for He3 is about $46,500 per troy ounce
> ($1500/gram, $1.5M/kg), more than 120 times the value of gold and
> over eight times the value of Rhodium.

Yes, but the demand for it is extremely small. It has no uses apart
from a handful of research labs, as far as I know. Its price is so
high only because the supply is currently extremely limited. So you
have to wonder how much He3 the market could absorb before the demand
would be used up, and the price would drop to a tiny fraction of the
current price.

> Question: can we reduce the cost of recovering He3 from the lunar
> surface to that level, e.g. $1500 per gram? What would be the capital
> cost of setting up a small He3 production facility on Luna?

I would guess that any scale of operations that involved setting up
even a small production facility would saturate the market and kill its
own source of revenue. If there's any way to make money of He3, I'd
think it would need to be a small probe that returns a small quantity
of He3, for a low mission cost.

Best,
- Joe

Joe Strout -- joe@...