India’s space agency unveiled on
Wednesday the spacecraft that it hopes will get to the Moon by September, making
the country the fourth one to achieve a soft landing on the Earth’s natural
satellite after the United States, the former Soviet Union and China.
Chandrayaan-2, India’s second lunar
mission, is scheduled to lift off on July 15, Indian Space Research Organization’s
(ISRO) chairman, Kailasavadivoo Sivan, said.
It comes more than a decade after the country launched its first lunar mission, Chandrayaan-1, which was just an orbiter and never landed on the moon.
There are an estimated one million tonnes of helium-3 in the moon, though only 25% of that could be brought to Earth, Gerald Kulcinski, director of the Fusion Technology Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a former member of the NASA Advisory Council told Bloomberg last year.
But that’s enough to meet the
world’s current energy demands for at least two, and maybe as many as five,
centuries, said the expert said, who estimates that helium-3 is worth almost $5
billion a tonne.
India isn’t the only one getting on board of the lunar mining train. Both China and the European Union have recently floated ideas about extracting Helium-3 from the Earth’s natural satellite. Beijing, in fact, has already landed on the moon twice in the 21st century, with more missions to follow.
No longer science fiction
After being considered mostly a science-fiction tale, governments are now rushing to implement programs and legislation that allow them to join the race for mining in space.
In 2015, former US President Barack Obama signed a law that grants US citizens rights to own resources mined in space. The ground-breaking rule was touted as a major boost to asteroid mining because it encourages the commercial exploration and utilization of resources from asteroids obtained by US firms.
Shortly after, Luxembourg launched an official initiative to promote
the mining of asteroids for minerals. The tiny European country, which has been
studying possible involvement in the sector since 2013, aims to become Europe’s
centre for space mining.
Canada is also eying the moon. Last
year, Northern Ontario-based Deltion Innovations partnered with Moon
Express, the first American private space exploration firm to have been granted government permission to travel beyond Earth’s
orbit, on future opportunities in outer space.
Some of the space ventures in the
works include plans to mine asteroids, track space debris, build
the first human settlement in Mars, and billionaire Elon Musk’s
own plan for an unmanned mission to the red planet.
Geologists as well as emerging
companies, such as US-based Planetary Resources, a firm pioneering the space
mining industry, believe asteroids are packed with iron ore, nickel and
precious metals at much higher concentrations than those found on Earth, making
up a market valued in the trillions of dollars.