Decius wrote:

If only you could A) land a space shuttle on the moon,

See Nasa's most recent announcements.

B) extract the helium in that quantity

AFAIK this is easy.

C) PRODUCE NUCLEAR FUSION

See ITER.

D) sell the public on said NUCLEAR FUSION

That appears to be the sticky part, but fortunately its going to be about 15 years before we really need to worry about that.

I've been following NASA, of course. I'm as happy as the next guy that we're ditching the overcomplicated, untenable "shuttle" for something that will actually get us off this rock reliably.

From what I saw, the lander portion of the current design still isn't terribly large, and the cargo segments of the rockets aren't designed for re-entry. Did he mean the lander? Possibly, tho he said "space shuttle" so i really don't know what he's about.

I'd check up on ITER, but they're not responding... at any rate, I'm skeptical how close we are to the real thing.

At any rate, I was bitching more about the tone of the article than the content anyway... it was written as if we're just waiting for that darn NASA to get this thing done so we can get unlimited energy from the moon and spent no time on the various hurdles still in front of us.

RE: US: UW scientists want to mine moon energy | EnergyBulletin.net | Energy and Peak Oil News