Existing Helium-3 market could finance lunar elevator today

Forum: SSI-List
Thread: Existing Helium-3 market could finance lunar elevator today

# 22815 bysailor.barsoom on Nov. 28, 2012, 8:02 p.m.
Member since 2022-08-22

Maybe use it for radiation shielding of ISS, eventual space hotels, and even some unmanned satellites which may be especially susceptible to radiation.

Since the stuff needs some processing to separate out the He3, we might as well separate out the oxygen and make it available. That might not be economical on it's own, because it's chicken-and-egg: there isn't a market for Lunar oxygen because there isn't enough spaceflight to justify it, but if it weren't for the cost of transporting oxygen to space, there'd be more spaceflight. Well, if we're processing 150,000 tons of regolith anyway, the additional expense of separating out the oxygen should be quite doable. And you'd still have the other stuff for shielding.