Project Icarus: the Gas Mines of Uranus

astroengine writes "When considering the fuel source for a fusion-powered interstellar probe, wouldn't it be a good idea to set up a colony on the moon and start pillaging the lunar surface for its helium-3 riches? Not so fast, says Adam Crowl of Project Icarus, there may be a far more viable source. What about the gas giants? Although Jupiter's gravity could pose a problem and Saturn's rings might get in the way (and forget Neptune, that place is one hell of a commute), perhaps the helium-3 in the Uranian atmosphere could be mined using atmospheric balloons?"

Comments

Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

The gas mines.... of Uranus.

Please tell me that this story is a joke.

Re:Really?

[metamatic]

Yes, there’s nothing funny about Uranus. Let’s forget the childish humor and take a serious, scholarly look at Uranus. To many people it’s just a giant cloud of gas where the sun doesn’t shine, but those of us who are enthusiastic about Uranus know that it has many secrets.

Surprising as it may seem, we don’t have all that many photographs of Uranus. Yes, the Pioneers sent back pictures of Uranus, lots of them. But there are very few images that are high enough resolution and quality to show the faint rings around Uranus. Perhaps the excitement around Project Icarus will give us the excuse we need to take another long, hard look at Uranus.

Even if you have no idea how to find Uranus, you can still appreciate its unusual configuration. Scientists still don’t understand why Uranus is tilted sideways. Also, while we know what’s near the surface, we still aren’t sure of the exact chemical mixture deep inside Uranus. Are the moons stable, or are they spiraling into Uranus?

With so much to learn, we must hope that NASA will probe the depths of Uranus soon. Yes, there are many technical issues that will need to be resolved, and problems to be faced—but we put men on the moon, and I’m sure that given sufficient motivation, NASA’s engineers can lick Uranus too.

Cheaper to make 3He on Earth?

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

Rather than shipping factories to outer planets and extracting helium-3 from a dilute mixture, why not use technology that already exists? Irradiate lithium in a fission reactor, get tritium as a result, and let it decay to helium-3.

Re:In the words of my man Sagan...

[w0mprat]

"It does seem to be sufficient short-term profit to motivate private industry. If we humans ever go to those worlds than it will be because a nation or a consortium of them believes it to be to its advantage or to the advantage of the human species...

Just now, there are a great many matters pressing in on us that compete for the money it takes to send people to other worlds. Should we solve those problems first or are they a reason for going?"

No, we shouldn't, thanks for asking. That's a common argument, but unfortunatley wrong. Basically put spin offs from the investment in the space program and other research from after WWII and through the cold war have transformed our technological civilization.

... to the point that landing on the moon was just about a flag. In the case of the Apollo program, $150 billion in todays money was dumped on our brightest minds (about 400,000 people, many highly skilled jobs) top universities and our most cutting edge industry. If it all crashed and burned on the launch pad it wouldn't have mattered, the boost to humanity was awesome.

If you look at list of the problems we need to solve on this planet, they read like a list of technological problems to get to the stars. No 1 might be clean, cheap, unlimited energy that fusion would be a good candidate for. No 2 might be ecosystems - we'll need food and air recycling for long space flight. It goes on. It's the teach a man to fish principal. We need to skip frittering away resources on what seems to be the most pressing and urgent problems and go straight for the big goals.

Dare I say it, we have our problems now, and are poorly equipped to face them because we gave up on spaceflight some time in the 1970s and worried to much about problems to close to home.