Re: US Intuitive Machines set for second moon landing in February

On 11/01/2025 13:11, Bill Sloman wrote:

On 11/01/2025 7:29 pm, Jeff Layman wrote:

On 11/01/2025 04:17, Bill Sloman wrote:

Everything I've read about fusion power states that to start it an
immense amount of power is required.

 Then you haven't read much. Cold fusion wouldn't take much power at all,
if it worked.

Is that the best you can do? You'll get a reputation for trolling, or perhaps you've got a signed picture of Fleischmann and Pons on your wall.

How are you going to get that power
source to the moon? And if you can do that, why not use that to provide
lunar power needs? Or is it that you're going to do something like
charge a large bank of capacitors from solar cells on the moon? How are
you going to get those capacitors and solar cells to the moon? And so on.
>
By the way, whoever wrote that abstract didn't bother checking it: "...
from 3He, fusion power can be provided to terrestrial electrical needs
and to interplanetary travel." Did they /really/ mean "terrestrial"
electrical needs? Or did they intend to say "lunar" electrical needs?
>
You might also like to consider a couple of comments from
<https://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Preparing_for_the_Future/Space_for_Earth/Energy/Helium-3_mining_on_the_lunar_surface>:
>
"...Gerald Kulcinski at the University of Wisconsin-Madison is another
leading proponent. He has created a small reactor at the Fusion
Technology Institute, but so far it has not been possible to create the
helium fusion reaction with a net power output."
>
"Not everyone is in agreement that Helium 3 will produce a safe fusion
solution.

 We do have an unlimited supply of people willing to express opinions
about stuff they known very little about. Some - like Cursitor Doom -
seem to search out the most fatuous misinformation they can find and
repost that.
 

In an article entitled "Fears over Factoids" in 2007, the
theoretical physicist Frank Close famously described the concept as
"moonshine"."

 https://hb11.energy/
 is perhaps also moonshine, but they do seem to be attracting investors.
Boron-hydrogen fusion does have the advantage of not generating
neutrons, so the hardware would last a lot longer if they ever got it to
work (and the prospects are rather better than they are for cold fusion).

Perhaps you'd like to predict when /you/ think that fusion energy will become commercially available, and what form it will take. That should be easy enough as you obviously know a lot about fusion energy.
--
Jeff