Helium-3 and the Road to Plymouth

[beamjockey]

I am always eager to see a science fiction show with reasonably accurate science in it-- having consumed entirely too much of the other kind. And I am always rooting for filmmakers who are willing to respect science and technology, even when the result is less than successful. The number of TV series that have attempted plausible portrayals of near-future spaceflight is quite small. In 1990 or so, I was hoping Lee David Zlotoff would add one to the list.

James Nicoll has begun watching, and commenting upon, Plymouth, a 1991 movie that has long intrigued me. (Installment 1 of James's comments.) (2.) (3.) (4.) An industrial accident having rendered the town of Plymouth, Oregon uninhabitable, the residents accept an offer to move en masse to a new lunar colony.

This film was Zlotoff’s pilot for a planned TV series, but it did not sell, and the pilot movie was aired on the ABC network 24 May 1991. It has never been released on tape or DVD. But it has turned up on Youtube.

In the second installment of his Plymouthblogging, James writes:

AAAAAAAAAAUUUUUUUUUUUGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH

I mean, "I didn't realize enthusiasm about lunar helium 3 goes back to 1991. How interesting."

At this point I realized that it might be worth discussing the background of lunar-settlement ideas at the time Plymouth was made. (Your headquarters for this kind of stuff is the Lunar Bases & Settlement Library assembled by the National Space Society. It contains a remarkable number of books, papers, and conference proceedings.)

As you may know, University of Wisconsin researchers proposed 25 years ago that helium-3, combined with deuterium, would make a wonderful fuel for advanced fusion reactors. Because there is very little helium-3 on Earth, it would have to be obtained elsewhere. The idea was to recover helium-3 particles pounded into the lunar soil by the solar wind. This requires mining operations on a massive scale. One would have to strip-mine and bake acres of regolith to get a few grams of the precious isotope.

James does not think this is a good idea.*

The rise of helium-3 dovetailed with a revival of interest in a Moon base, as expressed in the proceedings of a 1984 conference, Lunar Bases and Space Activities of the 21st Century (866 pages) (HTML) (page offering a big PDF of the entire book as well as PDFs of individual papers).

The cover painting by Pat Rawlings shows a spacesuited adult and a spacesuited child watching a lunar mass-driver ship payloads of oxygen to industrial operations somewhere in near-Earth space. They're sitting beside a sign proclaiming "Future Site of the Apollo Museum." The Earth hangs just above the horizon (we must be at a high northern latitude, because Asia is above Australia.)

Two years after this conference, a year after the book came out, L.J. Wittenberg, J.F. Santarius and G.L. Kulcinski, who had been thinking for a while about fusion reactors that would burn something other than deuterium-tritium, published their seminal paper, Lunar Source of He-3 for Commercial Fusion Power.

I welcomed this novel idea, and took it as a sign that as more people from different disciplines got involved in thinking about lunar settlement and other extraterrestrial endeavors, clever new ideas would appear.

In 1988, I attended another conference in Houston, which you can read about in The Second Conference on Lunar Bases and Space Activities of the 21st Century, again edited by Wendell W. Mendell. Here's the "complete online copy" consisting of an HTML page with links to a PDF of each chapter.

In particular, the Wisconsin fusion guys attended this conference and presented their shiny new helium-3 idea: Fusion Energy from the Moon for the Twenty-first Century. At this point they already had Harrison H. Schmitt-- moonwalker, geologist, and former Senator-- on board as a coauthor; today he remains the most prominent figure advocating helium-3 mining.

John Santarius also contributed a solo paper on how helium-3 fusion might be useful for propulsion, Lunar ³He, Fusion Propulsion, and Space Development. And T.M. Crabb and M. K. Jacobs jumped on the bandwagon with Synergism of ³He Acquisition with Lunar Base Evolution.

Many space advocates embraced helium-3. Here was something the Moon has that the Earth might need; small masses could easily be shipped to Earth. Maybe this would provide the economic incentive for investment in space transportation, lunar bases, and spacefaring infrastructure.

As a hot new idea, helium mining would work its way into science fiction. It was ripe for the plucking when Lee David Zlotoff decided to make a TV show set on the Moon. Helium mining would be the chief export of his lunar settlement.

In 1990 I attended a space conference where Zlotoff made a presentation on his production. He had enlisted the aid of numerous moonbase experts (most of whom I had met by this point). He had hired Pat Rawlings as conceptual designer to draw spacecraft, lunar rovers, and mining vehicles. He even cast an Apollo astronaut, Pete Conrad, to play himself, an aging astronaut bossing the lunar construction crew. He could not have found more knowledgeable advisers.

Here are some articles about the making of Plymouth.

I was hoping Zlotoff would succeed. Alas, the series was not picked up, and the pilot was aired as a TV movie, and rarely seen again.

I didn’t find it to be first-rate entertainment, and the transplanted-town premise was a bit hard to believe, but I really liked seeing a fairly realistic lunar colony on the screen. It had promise. I would have tuned in the series regularly-- but it was not to be.

If you want to see Plymouth for yourself:

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7
Part 8

Some of the comments on Youtube have been left by people who worked on the film.

As the years went on, helium-3's disadvantages seemed to loom larger (even as it was appearing in more science fiction stories and films), but it still has advocates. Here are the lecture slides from a course on "Resources from Space" at the University of Wisconsin in 2004, taught by several familiar scholars.




*For a lot of good reasons, which you can read here.

Comments

[vicarage.livejournal.com]

I met Schmidt when he was talking about He3 mining at Boulder in 2007. The only time I ever talked to a moon-walker, and then for only a minute.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

Your footnoted link 404s.

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

Thanks. Curly-quotes crept into the tag. Fixed now, I believe.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

Hmm.

It occurs to me that Lunar 3He is good for one thing -- so many people believe in it that it's a great cover story for other Lunar-based operations (such as, oh, installing a third strike strategic nuclear capability, along the lines of Allen Steele's "The Tranquility Alternative"). Not, you understand, that I'm advocating that ...

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I guess what goes around comes around: missile bases were the big reason to go to the moon back in the Fifties. (I never did get why the moon was supposed to be a better place to put missiles than, say, a submarine, but I'm speaking with hindsight.)

[autopope.livejournal.com]

I never did get why the moon was supposed to be a better place to put missiles than, say, a submarine

I think you'll find that the air force doesn't get to fly submarines, and the 1950s was the decade of "missiles will make manned aircraft obsolete within ten years" in certain military aviation circles.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Ah, but the Dean Drive will change all that!!

[bigbumble.livejournal.com]

I remember watching the show when it first came out. I was hopeful, but disappointed by the story line.

[purpleranger.livejournal.com]

I remember reading about this at the time it was aired -- probably in Starlog. I particularly remember one line being mentioned: "You didn't just get her pregnant -- you got the WHOLE TOWN pregnant!"

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

I remember the movie. Goodness, was it that long ago? I liked it, but maybe it failed because it was too realistic.

By the way, do you remember British TV show "Star Cops", also set on the Moon? I haven't seen it in ages, but I seem to remember that it too tried to be realistic.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

The episodes I've seen were set in space stations, and, yes, it did try to be as realistic as it could within the limits of the budget. It was another very early-1990s vision of the future in space, and while it wasn't the most thrilling show, I admired the effort.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...Actually late-1980s, I guess.

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

Mid- to late-1980s, yes... For some reason, the episodes I remember were the ones set on the Moon. I think the last one ended with the discovery of an alien artefact. The series isn't available in North-America, but it might still be available on European DVDs.

Spoapce Opera

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

I have never seen Star Cops, but would like to.

I have seen one episode of Men into Space.

Someone on James's blog pointed out a 1990 soap opera set in space that I never heard of before, the British Jupiter Moon. Call it a Spoapce Opera. It's set on a school orbiting Callisto, while a cisjovian project is constructing a starship.

IMDB has 36 episodes you can watch(Hulu is involved somehow). Science advisor was the British Interplanetary Society's stalwart Bob Parkinson. So the starship is called Daedalus and its target is "Parkinson's Star."

I watched one episode. It had some hard-SF ideas sprinkled in. I don't think I care to spend eighteen hours on this (or more-- someone said there are 100 episodes).

Definitely something Serge will want to sample.

Re: Spoapce Opera

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

I don't think I ever even heard of "Jupiter Moon", but I definitely remember "Men into Space", the look of which was very much inspired by Bonestell. Saw many episodes, in fact.

[e-m-b.livejournal.com]

The helium-3-on-the-moon pitch by the Wisconsin crowd was based on the deep commitment of the school's nuclear department to mirror fusion (with much of the plasma confinement provided by "baseball" magnets, in which the coils roughly follow the shape of a baseball's seams, and the resulting field acts like a mirror to the plasma). At that time, the case was being made that only the mirror approach could fuse D & He-3, which would allow for no radioactive material either at the beginning or at the end (the ashes from the reaction are an alpha particle and a proton, both charged and thus controllable by magnetic fields). Because of helium's two protons, the Coulomb barrier is twice as high for D/He-3 fusion than it is for D/tritium fusion.

As it happened, the mirror approach never got its big chance; enough money was found to finish building the Mirror Fusion Test Reactor at Livermore, but there was no money to operate it (the most ambitious fuel would have been D/tritium). This may sound like a major bureaucratic screwup, and maybe it was, but in the quarter century since then I'm not aware of anyone else pursuing the mirror approach, which suggests to me that there were technical issues (maybe with the baseball magnets holding their shape at extremely high field strength) that blocked further advances.

[e-m-b.livejournal.com]

Sorry, I need to add a little to what I just posted. The "Wisconsin crowd" refers to Gerry Kulcinski and his colleagues. Also, the official name of the never-operated device was the Mirror Fusion Test Facility-B. I think the "B" was added because of a mid-course design change that put baseball/mirror magnets at both ends of a cylindrical plasma chamber.

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

As you can see from the last link in my posting, as recently as 2004 Prof. Kulcinski and Prof. Santarius were still teaching young engineers about fusion and helium-3. (Nice of them to make course materials available to the Web!) Jack Schmitt was (and, I think, still is) an adjunct professor at U of W.

Here are recent publications from the fusion gang there.

[charlie-meadows.livejournal.com]

Nicoll makes a number of good points in his "Chimera" article. Rather annoyingly, some of these were brought up over 20 years ago and were generally shouted down by the True Believers.

One of those points which the Believers seem to be unable to accept going back even further (the early '70s) is that there was, and still is, no commodity that is *so* valuable that obtaining it from the Moon, Mars, the solar wind, etc. will pay for the expense of developing, building, and maintaining the "infrastructure"* to "harvest" it and bring it home AND turn a handsome profit for the investors. A lot of the promotion for He-3, as I recall, was also entwined with the idea that the Space Shuttle and a Space Station were going to make transport to the Moon, the Lagrangian points and Mars "too cheap to meter"**. (By about twenty years ago, it became clear that events weren't going to unfold that way and that the U.S. was making plans to spend its trillions in a rather different way in the future...)


*OK, I just had to Ngram this overused word: this term began to take hold around 1960 and its appearance has grown roughly along a power-law (not really exponentially) ever since.

** to extract a hypeing phrase from another technology that didn't play out quite as described at its inception