One of the more interesting films due to be released the summer of 2009 is a stirring, character-driven movie called Moon, staring Sam Rockwell and Kevin Spacey. Moon, directed by Duncan Jones, the son of the musician David Bowie, is a hardcore science fiction thriller about a lonely helium 3 miner ending a three year stint on the lunar surface.
In Moon, the movie, Sam Rockwell's character is named Sam Bell, the operator of a nearly totally automated helium 3 mining facility on the lunar surface later this century. Helium 3 is an isotope not found in nature on Earth and is deposited on the lunar surface by billions of years of solar wind. Helium 3 is thought by many to be the cleanest fuel for future fusion reactors and the future of Earth's energy salvation. Sam patrols the shadowed lunar surface in a rover created by the same U.K. model makers that crafted Alien's spaceship Nostromo. As the plot unfolds, Sam's robotic helper Gerty — voiced by Kevin Spacey, who does a near-perfect imitation of 2001: A Space Odyssey's HAL 9000 — begins to behave suspiciously.
The Big Quetion: Is art once again imitating life? Last year, China has announced plans to map "every inch" of the surface of the Moon and exploit the vast quantities of Helium-3 thought to lie buried in lunar rocks as part of its ambitious space-exploration program.
Ouyang Ziyuan, head of the first phase of lunar exploration, was quoted on government-sanctioned news site ChinaNews.com describing plans to collect three dimensional images of the Moon for future mining of Helium 3: "There are altogether 15 tons of helium-3 on Earth, while on the Moon, the total amount of Helium-3 can reach one to five million tons."
"Helium-3 is considered as a long-term, stable, safe, clean and cheap material for human beings to get nuclear energy through controllable nuclear fusion experiments," Ziyuan added. "If we human beings can finally use such energy material to generate electricity, then China might need 10 tons of helium-3 every year and in the world, about 100 tons of helium-3 will be needed every year."
Helium 3 fusion energy - classic Buck Rogers propulsion system- may be the key to future space exploration and settlement, requiring less radioactive shielding, lightening the load. Scientists estimate there are about one million tons of helium 3 on the moon, enough to power the world for thousands of years. The equivalent of a single space shuttle load or roughly 25 tons could supply the entire United States' energy needs for a year.
Thermonuclear reactors capable of processing Helium-3 would have to be built, along with major transport system to get various equipment to the Moon to process huge amounts of lunar soil and get the minerals back to Earth.
With China's announcement, a new Moon-focused Space Race seems locked in place. China made its first steps in space just a few years ago, and is in the process of establishing a lunar base by 2024. NASA is currently working on a new space vehicle, Orion, which is destined to fly the U.S. astronauts to the moon in 13 years, to deploy a permanent base.
The harvesting of Helium-3 on the could start by 2025.
Our lunar mining could be but a jumping off point for Helium 3 extraction from the atmospheres of our Solar System gas giants, Saturn and Jupiter.
Back on the Moon -The Movie- Sam Bell is assisted by his Hal 9000 style computer, voiced by Kevin Spacey. Sam Bell is almost totally alone, a malfunctioning satellite leaves him without even a real time communication system to connect him to Earth. His only link to his family, friends, and corporate employers is a video email system. The idea is to make Sam Bell the most isolated, alone man in history.
The film opens when Sam Bell has but two weeks before his contract is up and he is due to go home, to replaced by someone else. As is the nature of Hollywood plots, things start to go very wrong.
As he preps for his return, Sam starts hallucinating about sinister scenarios that may be unfolding at thel lunar outpost. Glitches in video messages he receives from his wife and from his corporate masters fuel his simmering paranoia.
The trailer shows the visual ambiance of Moon recalling the bleakness of 2001: A Space Odyssey, with the sterile environment, the space suits, vehicles, and a grey lunarscape backlighted by a big blue Earth.
The message of Moon, from advance reviews, is that the future is going to suck. At the Galaxy, we expect it will look like the dark, hard core sci-fi movies from the 1970's and the 1980's.
Posted by Casey Kazan.
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