Technology, Connected - The Rare Fuel That Could Make Us Mine the Moon

Episode Date: March 7, 2026

There are about 100 kilograms of helium-3 on planet Earth. The current US reserve is 29 kilograms. Global production runs around 20 kilograms per year. And early estimates put quantum computing demand alone at 300 to 400 kilograms per year. The math doesn't work, which is why people are starting to look at moon mining. On this episode of Thinking on Paper, we talk with Glen Martin, CEO of the Extraterrestrial Mining Company, about why helium-3 is suddenly one of the most strategically important isotopes on the planet, and why the Moon, with an estimated 1.1 million tons sitting in its lunar regolith, is where the next mining rush is heading. Martin walks us through what helium-3 actually is, how it gets to the Moon (carried on solar winds and trapped in titanium oxide because the Moon has no magnetosphere to deflect it), and why moon mining looks more like beach combing than the giant-drill image most people picture. Along the way: why dilution refrigerators for IBM, Google, and Microsoft's quantum computers are already running short on supply, why fusion is the killer app and how two helium-3 atoms fuse without creating radioactive waste, the rise of quantum hybrid data centers as the bridge to fusion deployment, and how a single square kilometer of lunar surface could yield 33 kilograms of helium-3 and remain effectively invisible from Earth.--📺 Watch on YouTube--Timestamps(00:00) Trailer(02:45) What is Helium-3, and why are we mining the Moon?(05:29) Why there’s almost no Helium-3 on Earth, and a million tons on the Moon(09:01) How Helium-3 could be harvested from lunar dust(10:33) Fusion without fallout: the clean-energy promise of Helium-3(13:01) Space-based solar power and fusion: two paths to future energy.(17:56) How private companies plan to finance Moon mining(21:52) The new space race: U.S., China, and the competition for lunar fuel(25:03) Can treaties prevent conflict over Moon resources?(27:37) AI, autonomy, and the machines that will mine the Moon(29:31) NASA’s commercial lunar payloads and the rise of space infrastructure(31:08) What lunar regolith tells us about Helium-3 reserves(33:35) The trillion-dollar question: who profits from space resources?(36:17) Curiosity, wonder, and the future of human exploration(40:01) Technology, morality, and the choice to be good--⁠Listen to every podcast⁠Follow us on ⁠Instagram⁠Follow us on ⁠X⁠Follow Mark on ⁠LinkedIn⁠Follow Jeremy on ⁠LinkedIn⁠Read our ⁠Substack⁠Email: [e-mail]--

Glenn Martin is the CEO of the extraterrestrial mining company. The big question on today's thinking on paper is where the private capital in the U.S. can build a cis-luner economy before China does. We talk about helium-3, moon mining, asteroid mining, fusion energy, quantum computing, the geopolitics of the U.S. China space race, autonomous robotics on the lunar surface, and which is the best Ian M. Bank's culture novel. Please enjoy the show. The current reserve in the U.S. is actually 29 kilograms.

You start mapping out demand, even in quantum, it's going to be three to 400 kilograms. And on the moon, there's 1.1 million tons. This helium-3 isotope pours down on the moon continuously, the Sea of Tranquility and Serenity in the Ocean of Storms that make, you know, for us the man in the moon, for the Chinese, the Jade Rabbit, it's embedded in there. Helium 3 is the Beaver Pelt of the economy. It's the one thing we can bring back from space. That is worth it and will kick open the rest of the economy.

There's no mounties on the moon. There's no mounties on there. But there is the space force. And the Chinese have their own space force. So it could get. It could get. Interesting. What is helium three?

Why is it so important? And why is it necessary or worthwhile to go to the moon to get it? Well, your intro was very accurate. It is the valuable isotope here on planet Earth. It is already being used, actually, for a lot of different applications currently. One is neutron detection, as you mentioned, it's used to scan shipping containers within the U.S. and other countries as they come across the border looking for nuclear materials, which is a code word for nuclear weapons. And so it's actually that that's the majority of use today. Also, it's a hyperpolarized gas.

It maintains its spin state, which is a little technical. But when you go in for an MRI for some checking for asthma or some other lung disease, you actually inhale this stuff. and it'll show up any of the diseases. And it's considered the best of these hyperpolarized gases for this purpose. It really gets interesting when we start talking about the two other major applications. One is quantum computing. As quantum computers get deployed at very large scales here in the coming five to ten years, you're going to be needing a lot of it for getting the quantum computers below 10 milichelven so they can stay entangled.

It's a curious state. But at the near absolute zero, it stays intangels. tangled and so can actually function as a chip. And then to your last point, fusion is going to be the killer app for helium-3. It's interesting at the other end of the spectrum from absolute zero at a billion degrees. You can fuse two helium-3 atoms together and create a burst of energy and heat without creating radioactive waste, which is gold standard within the industry. You can use deuterium and tritium, but they create radioactive waste.

So you start mapping this out in demand, you're looking at, you know, to your point, maybe 100 kilograms, that the current reserve in the U.S. is actually 29 kilograms. And we only produce about 20 of it globally per year, 20 kilograms. You start mapping out demand. Even in quantum, it's going to be 3 to 400 kilograms. And on the moon, there's 1.1 million tons estimated by NASA, based on some examples.

Has the quantum industry started to pull any of this demand through yet, or is it kind of like a future thing that they're figuring out how to incorporate? It's happening now. We talk to dilution refrigerator manufacturers like Maybel, quantum and blue fours in Finland and Oxford out of the UK and all of them are running short of supply. They're not getting the full allocations they need. They're starting to manufacture. Each dilution refrigerator needs about 40 liters, which is about five grams or so. And they can't get supply. They're shipping more than they, you know, than they can get fully charged

before they ship. IBM, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Intel, D-Wave and Canada are all building a larger and larger quantum computing data centers, and they're already outstripping terrestrial supply. Why is there so little on Earth, then why is there potentially so much on the moon? It's a rare isotope of helium. So if you look at, you know, what we used to put in balloons, helium, it's primarily helium four. So it's found primordially under the ground. They find reserves of it.

You may know that it's relatively rare, you know, but not nearly as crazy rare as helium-3, which only occurs in 0.0001% of naturally occurring healing here on planet Earth. And so we only get it here because we make tritium for nuclear weapons, actually. So within the U.S., there's a fairly large fleet of thermonuclear weapons, which are all tritium containers. About 12 years and a quarter in, 50% of the gas turns into helium 3 because it decays. It's a decayed byproduct of tritium. So the Department of Energy has to bleed off the helium 3 and they can resell it for commercial purposes, which it does.

So it's rare because there's only 10 kilograms per year coming out of the U.S. roughly. And again, early estimates of quantum demand is 2, 300 kilograms per year. A million tons beneath the surface? How far down? Great question. On the surface. Okay. So the reason that it's so concentrated on the lunar regal if the dust that covers the moon,

is that it's actually a byproduct of the fusion process of the sun. So it's carried on the solar winds. The earth blows it back out into space because we have this magnetosphere that protects us all, the gamma radiation from the sun cooking us all like a microwave. But on the moon there is no magnetosphere. So it just lands. This helium-3 isotope pours down on the moon, continuously. And it turns out that the titanium oxide in the lunar regalith in the dark patches that we see from Earth, like the Sea of Tranquility and Serenity in the Ocean of storms that make, you know, for us, the man in the moon, for the Chinese, the Jade Rabbit. So it's embedded in there very, very, very, very, and relatively higher concentrations than here on Earth. So when you, when I think of mining, I always think of these just like giant devices that are digging deep down in. I mean, you're what let's let's talk about what mining means.

for something that's just kind of landing on the survey. Is it more collecting? Is that a base? Yeah, it's, you know, it's funny. It's like diamond mining at the beginning where it was just scattered across the surface and you can collect it up. You just pick it up. It's like, you know, beachcoming.

It's a little bit like the movie Dune. If you saw this, the spice. And if there's a case to be made that helium three is the spice, the melange of planet Earth for all the positive benefits it's going to have for us. But no, you just, you go across. the surface, lift up the regalith, you can vibrate it actually, about half of the helium three and other volatile gases, disassociate because they're only loosely connected to these titanium oxide particles. And so you can actually take the gases out with a cold plate. And then you just

take the gas, all this undifferentiated gas because there's xenon and argon and krypton and some other amazingly named noble gases in the lunar regalph as well. And then it's, but you only have to go, you know, three meters deep at most. So you can just imagine, you know, if you've seen a beach being clean with a beach combing mesh that just takes out the particles, et cetera. So that's basically what you do. And then you redeposited, it just looks like nothing. And you may not have any of the pockmarks, the micrometeorite showers that hit the moon continuously. But that will happen again.

And then the beautiful thing about it, it's almost like harvesting insofar that if you take all the healing three, out of the lunar regolith over a large patch of ground up there. In 100 years of so, it recharges completely. So it's like a sponge. It absorbs helium 3 from the sun. So it's an ever-continuous, evergreen resource. So it's not like humanity pointing towards yet another thing to just squeeze all out of and then discard, right?

It's this, there's a little bit of regenerative stuff happening up there. That's pretty cool. That's right. It also sounds like it's when you say mining, on the moon, people automatically create an image in their head. And perhaps the message initially isn't this grandiose mining exploitation. If you, if it's, you don't need very much to go a long way. If it's so abundant, you wouldn't need initially to make much of an impact on the lunar

surface to collect enough to go a long way. Would that be accurate? So the actual mining material you would need initially would be quite small? You can, you know, from the Earth, this will be invisible for starters. You know, so one square kilometer roughly you'd need to cover it. Make about 33 kilograms. And so 33 kilograms, one nuclear reactor would burn about 50 kilograms per year. So, you know, if we completely go green with our energy mix, supply mix, which is to say mostly fusion,

You know, McKinsey's looking at the power supply mix in 2050. They anticipate, you know, 46% will be coming from fusion reactors. That means we're going to have to deploy a lot, a lot of nuclear fusion reactors because we're not only going to be replacing the current supply mix of fossil fuel-based generation, but we're also going to be decarbonizing and electrifying transportation sector and the industrial sector. and the industrial sectors are all going to electric and renewable sources. So it's pretty clear that fusion is going to play a major role in the supply mix. And we need a fuel, and that's the strategic bottleneck, and we have to go to the minimum.

We're basically trying to harness the power of the energy of a star, right? That's what we're doing. It's the same concept, right? The magic within a star. The sun is a big fusion reactor, and it's kept in balance by gravity is such a massive, of fuel, that the gravity contains it and just energy is released through the process. Ultimately, it'll burn out, as everyone knows, way off in the future, hopefully. But the point is, yeah, fusion reactor is basically a sun on planet Earth.

So we just use magnetic confinement, sometimes laser confinement. There's other field reverse configurations and things that keep it, the plasma ball contained. It's kind of that donut, that donut thing, right? There's like... That's, yeah, the talk amount, it's called. That's an old Soviet architecture. So I think that was their gift to us to make sure that we never got there. That's the one that slowed us down, yeah.

It did. And then there's a Stellarator architecture where it takes the donut and adds a twist. So it looks like a crueller, French crueler. And the biggest, if you're based in France, Eter just fired up. It's one of the biggest fusion reactors on the planet in France. What's your take on, just general take on the possibility of fusion as the future? You know, honestly, I think it's going. to be the core technology for generating electricity through our humans, humankind's expansion

into space, primarily because solar is very powerful, solar and wind, but at the end of the day, they're all derived from the power of the sun. And then the further way we get from the sun, you lose, you know, on an inverse ratio, you lose the ability to generate electricity with solar power. So we go to Mars, let's say, you know, you will need to generate your own electricity. We can start with fission, which is to say, you know, heavy elements that we break apart. But fusion is neat and tidy and powerful. Once we get the tech worked out, which is just an engineering problem, frankly. I believe that it'll be the core power source for all of our work in the solar system, but also here on Earth. I think it's going to be our go-to, frankly.

And again, McKinsey was like, man, we're looking at it. If it gets below two, thousand dollars per watt peak installed overnight costs it's called they think it'll penetrate forty six fifty percent of our electricity supply with the increased demand for GPU from the AI industry does that put the brakes on any potential transition to fusion because the demand is going to be so immediate and the technology won't have caught up or am i looking at that the wrong way well there's an interesting interstitial step that may actually drive sort of the transition through to fusion, which is to say because of the GPU energy demand and thermal cooling requirements, you know, and hence potentially a lot of use of water.

One of the reasons in the southwest of the U.S., in particular, this is such a hot topic, you know, Tucson, Arizona is like, no, we're saying no to this particular data center because it was going to consume a lot of the groundwater. But the energy constraint is really, they're all running headlong into it. I think one of the companies is reactivating three-mile island for God's sakes. And then nuclear reactors are going to be coming online as quickly as they can build them to power these things. They've got to be behind the meter because if they're on the grid, they're going to be driving up wholesale electricity costs, which is what they're doing.

But there's a disruptive event that's coming and that are, frankly, not many people we're talking about because they're just projecting GPU, you know, deployments for AI on a straight line. And it's more electricity on planet Earth that we can generate for, you know, 10 times of whatever we're going to generate. So we're going to hit a wall, frankly, on that. And, you know, Philip Johnston, brilliant man, you know, the November 2nd down here in Florida to lower orbit, potentially this idea of putting data centers in space is one of the relief cells for this, for this bottleneck. The other is quantum. And so as these GPU, based data centers for training large AI, large language models run into these bottlenecks,

and they're running out of places to put them as well relative to data latency. They're going to start deploying quantum GPU hybrids. So a lot more quantum. Quantum is very good at certain types of calics, and I think Willow at Google just ran a test where they were 27 septillionths faster than a GPU or some insane number. Julian Kelly over there, another great candidate for thinking out paper. So they're good at certain things and GPUs are great at certain things. So it's likely that we're going to see a lot of quantum data center hybrids being deployed in the next five to 10 years. And so that's going to pull down on the power of demand and the cooling requirements for water. But that then creates the strategic bottleneck of helium three.

And all this will be in advance of the fusion deployments, which if you look at Helion or tri alpha energy, by the way, Sam Altman is one of the biggest investors. in Helion, as is Breakthrough Energy's, which is Bill Gates' investment arm in Seattle. So they're placing bets on fusion, but my money, and this is really well not a well-explored topic, is these quantum hybrid data centers. Let's talk about XMC a little bit. How do we get to be able to grab some of that wonderful dust off the moon and bring it down to Earth and help solve some problems? Right on.

Well, look, as I mentioned my background, I was a designer on the space station starting the early 90s down in Huntington Beach and worked on the starboard one and port one segments, which are the thermal control, you know, the heat rejection into deep space. One of the big constraints that Philip at the Star Cloud guys are really grappling with, how to reject heat into deep space. That's a 250 kilowatt array. The astronauts are creating heat. It's been flying for 25 years now, mercifully, without knocking on wood, without any operational. operational problems. But that was $150 billion investment across multiple civil space agencies, U.S., Russia, Canada, Japan, and the European Union. And, you know, the idea that we're going to do another Apollo 2.0 or ISS 2.0 to start expanding the global economy into cis lunar space to create

a cis lunar economy is just not going to happen. And it turns out, you know, I took, you know, back in 97, I launched some satellites. I started a new satellite operator company, sold to satellites in space, then got migrated over to large-scale solar development, terrestrial, and started working with some really interesting companies and financial partners and development entities and some governments in Canada and elsewhere that really, you know, sort of drove this idea that you can use private capital through private-public partnerships to develop massive infrastructure, you know, billions upon billions of dollars.

Interestingly, there's like a two to three billion dollar sweet spot in financing these things. So if you package space infrastructure in a very similar way that you might package a solar plant or a liquid natural gas terminal or a brand new bridge or tunnel or airport, it actually can be developed and financed very rapidly. And so that's the thesis of XMC, is that we'll be bringing all of that, you know, the lessons learned, that I got over the last decade of developing infrastructure on Earth, solar and smart grid, and bring that to space infrastructure. And I believe that's the way we're going to crack the code,

because it's not going to be government, not going to be defense, it's not going to be venture-backed startups up there building billion-dollar lunar mines. It's going to be developers that are used to developing large-scale space infrastructure. Yeah, the public-private partnership, I think, is it, is an interesting scale approach, right? You know, doing it one or the other is going to take forever, but kind of doing it, it's proven like these large civil projects, right, that are happening on Earth kind of happen that way.

Correct, correct. And just to touch on Mark's background, it's a methodology that was really embraced by the United Kingdom, picked up in Canada and Australia. You had to modify the way the governments buy services. You know, they have to think, okay, I'm going to do a 10-year deal with this private entity. this private infrastructure entity,

and give them a concession agreement, say, to build a highway from here to there. The U.S. is lagging somewhat in this area, which is interesting insofar that we don't do multi-year offtake contracts here, but it's starting to peek in. One of our advisors, actually, who you guys would love is Charles Miller.

You know, he's one of early commercial space entrepreneurs. He founded nanor racks, and more recently, Link, Global. And he actually conceptualized the idea of the commercial orbital transportation services contract for the NASA resupply missions to the International Space Station, which is really a P3 contract. And who won that was SpaceX, in addition to orbital sciences.

So SpaceX is what it is today because of this P3 architecture of supplying the space station. And later, actually, they won the follow-on, which was the human delivery of humans to the space station. They would never say. Whenever you speak about nations, an infrastructure. I live in France and things get built incredibly slowly. And then you hear of other countries in the world, they build megalopolis in the time that we build a bridge over a stream.

In the community, in the international community for projects like this, is there a similar flop? Are people, are some countries moving quicker than others? Are they more ambitious? Do they have more readily accessible goals than others? Yeah, well, the elephant in this, room. And we could talk about the United Nations Committee for Peaceful uses of outer space, and they have a space resources working group that's working on a treaty for how we can

actually make claims on the moon and protect the operations and have this country say, okay, this company is going to do this, and we're going to be here and you stay out, does a hundred kilometer keep out zone? And under the Outer Space Treaty, you know, in honor of this particular treaty from 1967. But to your point, the big grill in the room is China. If you want to talk about high-speed rail, and bluntly, I don't know the statistics, but it looks like in, I don't know, 20 years, they've completely blanketed their country in high-speed rail. They could build a brand-new station in 12 hours. And they're doing the same with high-voltage electricity lines. They're building a massive solar and wind facilities in the northwest of the country,

and linking that down to the population centers. They have absolutely cracked the code. And when I was a design on station, you know, in 1992, I was called in a conference room over a weekend, a Thanksgiving weekend, actually, to redesign the elements that we were building to bring in Russians, to bring in the Russian components to do stationkeeping and resupply. Because we, after the fall of Soviet Union and then the Duma, when Yeltsin came in, we decided that we didn't want the Russians to do, you know, build nuclear weapons for bad actors. So we wanted to embrace them and bring them into the space station, which we did successfully. And to this day, even with the war and everything else going on in Ukraine, the Russians are still flying to the space station.

We still have Russian cosmonauts on the station. But we blocked the Chinese. Somewhere along the way, we decided that we didn't want the Chinese in on our top secret space technology. So we blocked them a little bit like we did with invidia chips. And so they worked around that. And they've created an absolute relentless machine that has been, okay, they built Tian Gong, their space station in three years. It's been continuously operating the last four or five years.

I can't remember exactly how long it's been flying. They have a plan to land tychanots, which is what they call their astronauts, on the moon by 2029 because that's the 80th anniversary of the revolution. and from 1944. So, you know, all analyses are showing they're just chunking away at that goal. They landed on the moon in 2020 and 2024 in the fields with the highest concentrations of helium three and brought back two kilogram samples. So they're doing it.

They know what's up there and they're going for the helium three too. They're going for it. That sounds like a call to action. Glenn, so I know, Jeremy, the politics of space is something you're very interested in. Who has a right? Who's planting the flag in the regolith? How do we solve that problem before we get up there?

How do we come to some kind of global agreement? Well, the answer is we do and we don't. And so there are two different approaches being parallel pathed right now. There's the United Nations strategy, which, you know, when Russia and the US, we're going to go land a human on the moon and those big, you know, the first space race. And, you know, it looked like it was going to be before the decade was out, according to the Kennedy speech. And so the United Nations got together very quickly and said, okay, you know what,

we're going to draft and everybody's going to sign this outer space treaty where we're not going to put weapons in space. We're not going to claim any territory for either country. We're going to treat space very differently. And both the U.S. and Russia and all the other countries, which weren't at the time spacefaring, signed the outer space treaty. in 1967, two years ahead of the 69 landings. Right now, the United Nations is doing exactly the same thing.

They're coming up with a space resources treaty for a draft as being released in 2007, two years in advance of the 29, 30 landings that everyone anticipates. So it'll have all the language about how we peacefully cohabitate and share, and then there's the rim of eternal light. I'm sure you guys have heard on the South Hole, which has 24-hour solar, you know, and where the water is concentrated in the permanently shadowed regions of these craters like Shackleton crater. We had a great little chat back and forth.

I think it was one of our book club lives where someone chimed in on what does a permit look like for the dark side of the moon. I thought that was pretty fun and clever. Well, funny, that's where the Chinese landed, which, you know, they put together a relay satellite network to be able to land on the far side of the moon with a nuclear-powered rover, take the sample and go back to Earth. Then there's, when I mentioned the parallel path, the other path is what's being done in deep sea bed mining. There's an analog right now happening in that the United Nations has deep sea bed mining authority in Kingston, Jamaica, a little bit like the ITU in Geneva, where they control geostationary frequency regulation, everything else, and coordination between countries.

So this deep sea bed mining authority in Jamaica, you know, it's plugging away, but it doesn't come up with a framework yet. And so, you know, a U.S. company, the metals company, just got an executive order saying, no, no, no, you know, you're a U.S. company, go ahead. And that's the way we're going to do it. And so when it comes to the moon, it may look a little bit more like the gold rush in the Wild West, honestly, than Western Canada, which had RCMP officers showing up to instill order in the law beforehand. So we're going to see which methodology takes precedence. But honestly, if you just go up there and start mining under U.S. domestic space laws, we have to rely on the space force as the Catholic.

There's no Mounties on the Moon. There's no Mounties on the Moon. But there is the space force. And the Chinese have their own space force. So it could get, it could get interesting. Like, if we were just riffing right now, and we could rewrite rules on how humans

operate, like, what would be some optimization that we could consider and think about? This is one of the big questions I get when we talk about how we're going to do this mission architecture. How do we fly to the moon? How do we mine it? you know, sift it, I guess would be maybe more accurate. And then bring, how do we bring it back?

And the short answer in the time frame we're talking about is autonomous robotics. AI driven little brains on the lunar surface, a little bit like Tesla robotaxies, but out there without any humans in the loop, meaning we're not teleoperating them. They're thinking for themselves. They're avoiding obstacles. They're not going to tumble down the side of a crater. They're intelligent agents. Now, the humans, we're talking about landing on the South Pole because there's a

water and we need water and we need radiation protection and we need shielding from the micrometeorites and from the thermal swings of the moon, which is a still very bloody cold. And so when you talk about enhancing humanity, this is an interesting thing. You know, I met no Elon Musk fairly well. I almost bought the first Falcon 9 for that satellite company I was telling about. If you squint and you actually look at the body of his work, you can see where he's going with creating a hybrid human species that will be able to survive the rigors of space travel and, you know, landing and settling, you know, that loaded phrase, the moon, Mars, and other celestial bodies because of neuralink. And, you know, these things that we're going to need to adapt the human biology for space

because we are really poorly adapted for it. Do you have a goal in mind on when, like, the first little rover is deployed? Like, what is the timeline? You know, I know it takes a lot. It takes a ton. It takes a lot to put all this stuff together. But what do your timelines look like? Well, you know, NASA's been doing a great job with this Clips program, which is commercial lunar payload services.

And so they've been sprinkling some development dollars throughout this really dynamic ecosystem that's emerged in the sort of shadow of SpaceX. So, you know, $10 billion went into the SpaceX alumni startups. So you got guys spinning out of there constantly. and gals. And they're starting little companies, a lot of them in Hawthor and El Sagando area, doing things like Star Path is doing propellant manufacturing on the moon and little rovers and things like that. You've got lunar outpost, you've got intuitive machines, you've got astropotic, you've got firefly and others that are developing rovers and landers and robotics and other critical enabling technologies getting funded by NASA. And so, you know, you've got two, three,

four commercial landers every year now landing on the moon, testing. these technologies. The tech is developing very, very rapidly. It's just looking for a customer. That's the thing, right? So lunar mining is actually the customer that all these companies need to go beyond just NASA research grants and maybe defense contracts. How confident are you in that 1.1 million tons of helium 3 and resources on the moon on the moon's regolith in general? We're blessed in the U.S. We have about 400 kilograms of lunar regolith in Houston at the Johnson Space Center that was collected by the six missions that landed and collected samples. And they did it, you know, we're using a scoop in a bag and some other things that, you know, probably let loose a lot of the helium three molecules by agitation.

So we've got really great data on what the regolith is composed of. They did core samples. Jack Schmidt, who I met over the years, Apollo 17 astronaut, Harrison Jack Schmidt. You know, he was a geologist. He was the planetary geologist that was training all these test pilots and fighter jocks to collect rocks. But on the last mission, they said, you know what, we're going to cancel the program at 18, so we better fly a geologist. So Jack went to the moon 17.

He landed in the Lytro Highlands up just on the edge of Sea of Serenity. and found the orange glass, which proved, you know, these lava ejections into space of magma from volcanic activity. But the samples from 11, 17, and 12 actually showed the highest concentrations of helium 3. And so you can actually extrapolate. And then there was further analyses done, you know, the Clementine mission in 1994 that BMDO did, the U.S. Air Force, under then-Brigadier General Pete Warden. They scanned the moon and found these titanium oxide locations where it's more highly concentrated. So there's a lot of data that supports the estimate, again, 1.1 million. And a lot of people think it might actually be underestimated because of that collection methodology I just referred to.

And then the Russians had three Luna landers that also correlated this data. And now the Chinese have brought back two samples. And so that's being analyzed now. and they actually found a new crystal structure called, they've named Changa site for the Changa lander, which is the Chinese legend of the maiden that flies to the moon. But it embeds helium three within it. So they're finding new forms of this stuff.

So not confirmed that we really, there's something in mining called prospecting, which is you look at it from space or from low flying aircraft, and then there's exploration. You need to get boots on the ground, and take a core sample, say, you know, and capture it accurately and really say, okay, this much is in this regolith over this patch of land. What questions did you want us to ask that we didn't yet? Well, you touched on both the two questions that I really didn't want to cover.

I mean, the second being, what is the benefit to humanity, you know, what is the benefit of going to space? And if I can answer my own question in this way, you know, obviously Helium 3 is something. And I've looked farm-wide, by the way, guys. I was looking at lunar ice mining at one point and platinum group metals on asteroids. And, you know, solar power from space is something I worked at Phantom Works in the early 90s and Huntington Beach. We looked at this. And all these will come to be. And, you know, Anton Brevdi has this great thesis, which is there's this space for Earth economy right now.

It's about $500 billion. And it's primarily made up of exporting data from space. You know, you've got telecommunications. You've got broadcast satellites during mobile radio like XM. You've got direct-to-home satellite television. You've got GPS providing GPS for Uber. Uber is a space company at the end of the day because you couldn't do it without space assets. And then there's other elements, you know, Earth observing satellites,

which are really becoming a very powerful thing with low launch costs. And so that's all, but that's all Earth economy focused, right? That's serving the Earth economy. And this idea that at some point we're going to transition to this two trillion, dollar space economy. It's got to transition to something that's providing services to other space entities commercially. So that could just spin wildly, you know, once you kind of prime the pump. And, you know, I grew up in Canada, northern Canada, at a location, Sue St. Marie, where the Hudson's Bay Company used to trade Beaver Peltin. And the King of England, King Charles II, the declaration saying

the Hudson's Bay Company of Explorers and Adventurers are allowed to go to the New World and create a corporate entity on the New World to bring back Beaver Pelt. This one thing that was valuable back in Europe that the New World had. And so it actually kicked open the rest of the North American economy, along with some other things like, yeah. But the point is helium-3 is the beaver pelt of the economy. It's the one thing we can bring back from space that is worth it and will kick open the rest of the economy

will have mining operations robots, we'll be buying services from solar power guys from telecom, from navigation startups. So I think that the analog holds really well here. This is the Hudson's Bay Company,

the extraterrational mining company will be the one thing that kicks this cis lunar economy open. Unfortunately, one of my quickfire questions was, what are you curious about at the moment? Glenn's curious about everything. So what's the one

most what are you more curious about than anything else this week? This week I've been extraordinarily curious about how debt is structured for social infrastructure. And I've been talking to a lot of my Japanese colleagues at Nomura Securities. How do they fund bridges and tunnels and LNG terminals? And how do you approach that? What's the development process look like? And, you know, so I've been doing this insane deep dive on, on, on, on, large-scale infrastructure project development.

There's a great author, Bent Fliv-Bryorg, I'm sure I just mangled his name, a Dane who wrote a book with Dan Gardner from Canada called How Big Things Get Done. It's inspirational. It really speaks to what we're doing, and we're doing a big thing. What are you scared of this week?

I'm scared that we're losing momentum. If we're in a great power competition with China, we need all divvy firing in all cylinders. We need science to be working with industry. We need the manned space program at NASA to be moving ahead. It's under Artemis Accord, which is this brilliant international architecture. We got, you know, now with this beautiful, amazing, you know, Starship Flight 11 happening, we now have the platform to actually deploy rapidly to SISLuna space.

And so we just need to get our act together relative to how NASA is coordinating and get Jared Isaacman in. Full stop. That's my endorsement for today. So it scares me that we're not. The scary event is real, right? Didn't NASA just cut a bar or lose some funding and cut a bunch of people? JPL lost 500 folks. 500, right?

Yeah. And these are not dead wood, man. This is, these are, it's cut into the quick. We were founded in Pasadena. There's a lot of real talented folks down there with Caltech. And so, you know, I've seen this before, you know, in sort of waves of consolidation. Honestly, I think they'll all find homes. I think they'll spawn some startups.

I think they'll be great resources for, you know, new hires for these well-funded, this ecosystem that's emerging. So, you know, it's just, it'll just take a little time to adjust. Just to re-architecture more than anything else, yeah. Pretty much, yeah. That's it. Okay. Excellent.

Yeah. My last one was like, who are you listening to at the moment? But I think you mentioned that name at the end of. I'll just say it. It's, it's, it's, E&M Banks. I'm a huge fan of the cult. Oh, Mark. and that's who I listen.

I'm just re-listening to all eight books. Which is your favorite culture novel? Accession, without a doubt. Excession. Why? It's focused upon the AI and their search for meaning and how they interact. And that to me is one of the most fascinating questions to be answered now with the emergence of AI and potentially AGI soon.

Very interesting. Mark brings up. later books like surface detail. I just, I just consider Fleebus and player games and a few others. Frankly with the human part, I find a little less interesting, honestly.

So that's just surface detail. Maybe I'll, I'll cue that next. Okay. Thank you. I've got one last question and then we'll end with our final one. But you mentioned a word that that is a chorus in my head on a daily basis, the word curiosity. And I think the world, the thing that scares me is the world is becoming less curious,

individual by individual. Tom Waits has a great quote that says, we're in a deficit of wonder, right? How do you help, what could you say to the world right now to help them activate their curiosity, their sense of wonder? Well, maybe I'll just quote or paraphrase. Tom Waits on this point, which is to say his muse comes to him at the most inconvenient moments. I would simply say, you know, he's driving his car in traffic in Los Angeles and he's like, not now. And so I would say, listen to your muse, take the time. It's coming to us. Ideas are out

there. You know, they're occurring to everyone all the time at the same moment. You know, it's nothing really unique. I can't really defend an idea. It's just execution, man. So listen to your muse. Listen to Tom Wates has to say, make sure that you get a pen and pencil ready to write it down. I love it. Honor the moments. That's wonderful. Listen to more Tom Waits. Our final question, Glenn, is from Kevin Kelly.

We ask it to every guest on thinking on paper. What should humans be? And if you need it, how does technology help us get there? Humans should be good. We should be good. We need simply to be good to each other. How does technology get us there? space resources alleviate shortage. They alleviate need. And I think using the power of AI,

and this is why I'm a huge fan of UNM Banks and the culture series, that shows what is possible when we have AI in our lives that's benevolent allowing us to be ourselves. And so he writes about what is called post-scarcity societies. And so the reason I'm pursuing space resources, I'm driving towards a post-scarcity society. So we humans can simply be ourselves and be good to each other. There you have it. Thank you. Mark, closing thoughts.

Be disruptive. Stay curious. Keep thinking on paper.