Thursday Things: Mining the Moon Edition
20 March 2025. Vol 7 No 12. By Dan McGirt. #293
Thursday Things is here! This week we mine the moon.
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Open for business. Photo by Ganapathy Kumar on Unsplash
Moon mining
Back in high school I read the book 2081: A Hopeful View of the Human Future, by Gerard K. O’Neill. The conceit of the book is describing life in the year 2081. O’Neill described a future of space colonies, space mining, supercomputers, automated manufacturing, energy from satellite solar power and advanced nuclear reactors, and much more. He also discussed what he considered the main technological drivers of these changes and what, from the perspective of 1981, when the book was published, we needed to do to bring this future about.
2081 expanded on themes in O’Neill’s earlier book, The High Frontier, which I didn’t get my hands on until many years later. O’Neill’s books, along with those of Alvin & Heidi Toffler (Future Shock and it’s follow-ups) and Carl Sagan’s Cosmos television series had a big influence on shaping my thinking as a techno-optimist.
The High Frontier: The Untold Story of Dr. Gerard K. O’Neill is a documentary about O’Neill and his work. I think you can watch it on Apple TV.
I’m not a techno-utopian — I don’t believe any human society was, is, or will ever be perfect, for the simple reason that there will always be limitations, trade-offs, and compromises, and thus always winners and losers.1 Nor do I share the delusion that progress is some inevitable historical process — there is no arc of history, and no guarantee that things will always get better.
What I do believe is that things always can get better, that improvements and innovations are always possible, and that the outer limits of human ingenuity, and therefore progress, aren’t even close to being reached.2
Anyway, I’m not the only one on whom O’Neill’s books, work, and advocacy as president of the Space Studies Institute had a big influence. You may recognize some of their names:
The Disciples – Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos
It is 2021 and the future has arrived. Humankind’s activity in space does not remotely resemble the dreams of O’Neill. There are no permanent settlements on the moon, nor are there vast rotating space cities with artificial gravity. However, it is no coincidence that the ideas of the visionary physicist burn brightly in the minds of key individuals now at the forefront of the modern space economy. Jeff Bezos, better known as the founder of Amazon.com, but also at the creator of Blue Origin, loved ‘The High Frontier’. A 1986 Princeton graduate, Bezos attended O’Neill’s lectures and ran the campus chapter of “Students for the Exploration and Development of Space.” Likewise, Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX also gives O’Neill’s work credit in developing his own thinking around space exploration.3
Unlike Bezos and Musk I have not (yet) amassed a fortune of several hundred billion dollars with which to start my own rocket company and finance space exploration and settlement along the lines envisioned by O’Neill. But I am excited to see the building blocks of the High Frontier / 2081 future being put in place.
Bezos and Musk do differ on strategy — Bezos wants to build O’Neill colonies4 (artificial space habitats as envisioned by O’Neill), Musk thinks building such habitats makes no sense and is focused on settling Mars. Bezos says Mars is too far away and making it into a livable planet is what’s impractical. This is fine! Space is big. We can do both. And more. And should.
Don’t even get me started on Dyson spheres.
While the big names get the headlines (and not always for their work on reaching outer space…) there are many other smart, talented, dedicated people working to get humanity into space to do more than take a few measurements and gather a bag of moon rocks.
Like, for instance, mining the moon for helium:
A startup wants to mine the moon for helium
A startup company wants to establish mining operations on the moon to extract a rare isotope needed for future quantum computers and nuclear fusion reactors. And according to one of its scientific advisers, there’s little reason to “preserve the environment” in the process.
Specifically, they’re after the isotope Helium-3, which is rare on Earth, but much mor abundant on the moon:
Helium-3’s utility comes from its single neutron, which allows it to cool to extremely low temperatures. This attribute makes it particularly useful in constructing certain types of quantum computers, and it also may serve as fuel in nuclear fusion reactors.
The company is called Interlune. Their plans may succeed, or not. But what excites me is that in 2025 we live in a world where talk of Mars colonies, moon mining, permanent space habitats, and the like are found in the business and science news, not merely the pages of science fiction or speculative proposals for what could be.
For 1981 me, this is awesome. And the hopeful future world of 2081 is closer not only on the calendar — that much is inevitable — but is taking shape every day. I love to see it!
Yeah, I still have it. Image: Thursday Things
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That and the fallen nature of Man.
While always bearing in mind that our ingenuity for destruction is also unbounded.
An O’Neill colony or O’Neill cylinder, is a concept espoused by the American physicist Gerard K. O’Neill in his 1976 book The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space. Such a cylinder would actually have two five-mile-long counter-rotating cylinders, rotating in opposite directions and cancelling out any gyroscopic effects. This would also result in artificial gravity via the effect of the centrifugal force on the insides of the cylinders.
I remember being a little scared of the future of Future Shock. It seemed very big at the time. Today, not so much!!