helium-3

As Chandrayaan Surface Mission Ends, ISRO Needs Support, Constructive Criticism

Only if we remember what our failures are – not what they have been spun into – can we hope to correct them in the future.

Bangalore: Shortly before 2.30 am on September 7, as a robot the size of a Tata Nano descended over the lunar surface for what was to be a historic Moon landing, something happened.

We don’t know what it is yet. The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), whose scientists made this robot (as well as the smaller robot it contained), have promised answers soon but they can’t seem to come soon enough. Whatever happened, Vikram crashed on the Moon’s surface instead of touching down and its part of the Chandrayaan 2 mission was deemed a failure.

By 3:30 am, ISRO officials, led by its chairman K. Sivan, confirmed that the organisation had lost its communications link with the larger robot, named for Vikram Sarabhai. By 4 am, work had begun to restore this link, together with other efforts to salvage this part of the mission – a part that had, until that moment, basked in the public glare.

Whether it was the pressure to deliver a positive result – accentuated by the presence of the media-savvy Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the control room – or a complete and not unheard-of inability to manage public relations in the event of a failure, ISRO sought refuge in spin.

The organisation’s reps began to talk about how India’s new lunar orbiter, the only part of Chandrayaan 2 that had succeeded, was actually the most important part of the mission. It was a doctoring exercise that ISRO, with the support of right-wing Twitter trolls, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) fanatics online and off and practically everyone who couldn’t reimagine failures as teaching moments, began to execute.

By the morning of September 8, the mainstream media was flush with reports that apparently 95% of the mission had ‘succeeded’. Notes of congratulations proliferated online. Everywhere you looked, it was as if the orbiter was the whole point all along and that everyone was proud of ISRO’s work.

This was the ‘high’, when, pumped with the drugs of nationalism, questions are taboo and criticism leads to death threats. Closely reflecting an undercurrent of Modi’s reign as the prime minister, casual observers had conflated technology with science and reason had been pushed to the backseat. There was no greater example of this than the repeated and grossly mistaken claims that ISRO wanted to mine the lunar regolith for helium-3.

In the two weeks following the events of September 7, the country slowly but surely forgot what really happened – not the actual cause of the mishap but its relative significance in the larger scheme of things – and moved on to other entertainment.

A few news outlets published a flurry of unverified reports while news syndication services amplified everything Sivan or Modi or anyone else said about the mission. The explosion of articles about why the orbiter was the real deal persisted, though now as a trickle. NASA also made the occasional appearance since it had offered the services of its lunar orbiter for ISRO to spot its lander, which – according to some source or other – now lay prone on the Moon a mere 500 m from its original landing site.

Also read: With Chandrayaan 2 Setting Sail, What Will India Put on the Moon Next?

Meanwhile, in their aggressive desire to not cede even an inch to their political opponents, the BJP’s critics began to ask if Chandrayaan 2 was a sensible way to spend the money and time the government had, with little regard for how India’s historically unique space programme is tied to the country’s vast public administration system.

The stage is now set for big media to move on because Chandrayaan 2 isn’t the only major thing on ISRO’s agenda this year. Imminent missions include the first flight of the Small Satellite Launch Vehicle, the launch of CartoSat 3, the testing of its first semi-cryogenic engine and Gaganyaan. However, moving on should not be an excuse to forget.

Say the Chandrayaan 2 mission could be cleanly cut into two parts (though it can’t for technical reasons): science and technology. When the lander failed to execute its autonomous touchdown, the technological mission was, in the basest terms, only one-third complete; the scientific mission was yet to begin. There is no moral or ethic attached to this qualification but the problem, such as in the form of a perceived need to spin the failure into a triumphalist narrative, arises when one assumes otherwise.

When a developing country’s debut lunar landing mission fails, it doesn’t at all fail in the same way as, for example, a unique identity programme does when it causes personal information to leak into the public domain.

ISRO could have said there was a mistake because that is eminently understandable, and everyone could have moved on knowing that the more we learn from this incident, the more failure-proof its successor could be. Instead, it couldn’t admit a mistake without also reiterating what it had got right.

Also read: Why Chandrayaan 2 Was a Success Well Before ‘Vikram’ Got to the Moon

We are now at the twilight of Chandrayaan 2’s landing mission. The lander and the robot inside it, a rover named Pragyan, are both fit with lithium-ion cells that store energy produced by solar panels on their bodies and discharge it through wires to various instruments. Sadly these cells are not designed to be able to withstand an ambient temperature of under -160º C, and nights on the Moon have been known to plunge to -180º C.

This is why Chandrayaan 2’s surface mission was restricted to 14 Earth days: it corresponds to one half of a day on the Moon, and which – from September 7 to September 21 – experienced daylight in the part where the lander was supposed to touchdown. Today, the Sun will set on the part of the Moon where the lander is stranded and the lunar night will begin, and the batteries on the lander and rover will likely die.

Despite the Left’s misdirected protests, the Right’s misguided assertions and some scientists’ informed reservations, the Indian space programme could not have avoided Chandrayaan 2. Did the mission have any shortcomings? Absolutely, as do all ISRO missions thanks to their attendant political economics and sociology. Chandrayaan 2 was – and in the form of the orbiter, remains – India’s first major step towards the Moon, the mandatory exploratory leap that has to precede more advanced and more strategically charged programmes of the future.

We can help ISRO along with sensitive support, constructive criticism and a dogged demand for answers from one of the most inaccessible organisations in the country. But we must also constantly remember what failures are, not what they have been spun into.

China, Clearly a Country in a Hurry When It Comes to Space

We should not forget that if the Chang’e 4 was landing on the Moon, a NASA spacecraft was sending us photographs of an object 6.5 billion km away.

The Soviet Union’s Luna 2 mission reached the Moon – the first human-made object to do so – in September 1959. The first crewed mission, that of the US, came about almost exactly a decade later, in July 1969. After that, there were six more human landings and many uncrewed ones. But there were no more soft landings between August 1976 and December 2013, when China’s Chang’e 3 mission soft-landed on our natural satellite.

In terms of novelty, what is unique about Chang’e 4 is that this is the first time a space vehicle has landed on the far side of the Moon. This was a significant achievement because it is not possible to communicate directly with the spacecraft; signals have to be relayed through another satellite near the Moon and ‘visible’ from Earth. In the mission’s final phase, Chang’e 4 had no remote support and the crucial deceleration process had to be programmed in advance. As technical achievements go, of course, this does not quite compare with America’s spectacular human spaceflight missions.

But despite its past interest, the US and Russia don’t seem too interested in exploring the Moon. Currently, the Chinese and Indians are the ones doing that, suggesting there may not be much direct scientific or technological benefits to doing so. The Google Lunar XPrize competition to promote privately funded options failed and its $30 million award remains unclaimed.

Also read: Five Human Spaceflight Missions to Look Forward to in the Next Decade

Writing on the benefits of going back to the Moon, Nathan Wong, a consultant for the Lunar XPrize listed science, power, water, analogue demonstration and launch port capability as the potential benefits. However, all of them are clearly well into the future and do not seem to evoke much interest at the moment.

In 2013, at the time when Chang’e 3 made the first soft-landing on the Moon in decades, Ouyang Ziyuan of the department of lunar and deep space exploration in China rationalised the Chinese programme thus:

First: to develop technology, because the effort requires great communications, computing and IT skills
Second: to understanding the nature of Earth’s neighbour, its origin, composition, history, etc.
Third: Team-building for a mission-mode approach that can be applied in other space or scientific endeavours

As for direct benefits, Ziyuan spoke of a future with manufacturing processes that could benefit, for example, from belts of highly efficient solar panels on orbit to produce power for those below. But any of these, or others besides, are decades away from being realised.

So, in essence, the Chang’e 4 mission was a prestige project, with the important goal of enthusing a Chinese space programme that has been growing by leaps and bounds and – like its American and Russian counterparts – has a military component as well. It has, as we noted, developed important IT-related capabilities, it presumes a certain launch vehicle capability for China and an ability to launch complex satellites.

Perhaps the most important project in the near horizon is the Chinese space station, under the Tiangong programme. China launched its first space laboratory, the Tiangong 1, in 2011, and Tiangong 2 in 2016. By 2020, it hopes to establish a multi-module space station weighing some 60 tonnes with the ability to support three astronauts for long-term habitation.

China also announced in 2017 that it would send astronauts to the Moon. Of course, it has already been the third country to independently send a human into space (Yang Liwei’s successful 2003 flight aboard Shenzhou 5). Since then, there have been five more missions that have carried a total of 12 astronauts, including two to its first space station, Tiangong 1.

But these are the high-profile programmes. China has a number of scientific as well as workhorse satellites with both military and civilian applications. Among the better known is the Beidou navigation satellite system, which already has a constellation of some 60-70 satellites. It also has a well-rounded launch vehicle programme with the Long March 5 rocket being the latest, capable of hoisting satellites of 25 tonnes to low-Earth orbit, 14 tonnes to the geostationary transfer orbit and 8 tonnes for trans-lunar injection. (The GSLV Mk III can carry 4 tonnes to the GTO.)

Also read: The Major Indian and International Space Missions to Look Out for in 2019

Unlike the Indian programme, and like those of the US and the Soviet Union, China’s space programme has its origins in the development of ballistic missiles in the 1950s. In 2007, China carried out an anti-satellite missile test that successfully destroyed an old weather satellite. In 2013, it carried out a test of a manoeuvring satellite that “captured” another satellite.

China is clearly a country in a hurry when it comes to the space programme. Just 15 years after the first Shenzhou carried a man into space, it now is on the verge of establishing an orbiting space station. While many of its space endeavours are for routine things like communications, meteorology and remote-sensing, there are missions that are to “show off” technology and, of course, military applications.

The next decade could see a greater militarisation of space. After all, the US just last year revealed plans to create a Space Force, which it says it needs because its adversaries (read: China and Russia) have made space a war-fighting domain. But the US remains number one, and we should not forget that if the Chang’e 4 was landing on the Moon, a NASA spacecraft was sending us photographs of an object 6.5 billion km away.

Manoj Joshi is a distinguished fellow at the Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi.

Who Owns the Moon? A Space Lawyer Answers

Forty-nine years ago, American astronauts planted a US flag on the moon. A space lawyer explains the implications, who owns the moon and what it means for lunar mining.

Most likely, this is the best-known picture of a flag ever taken: Buzz Aldrin standing next to the first US flag planted on the Moon. For those who knew their world history, it also rang some alarm bells. Only less than a century ago, back on Earth, planting a national flag in another part of the world still amounted to claiming that territory for the fatherland. Did the Stars and Stripes on the moon signify the establishment of an American colony?

When people hear for the first time that I am a lawyer practising and teaching something called “space law,” the question they ask most frequently, often with a big smile or a twinkle in the eye, is: “So tell me, who owns the moon?”

Of course, claiming new national territories had been very much a European habit, applied to non-European parts of the world. In particular, the Portuguese, the Spanish, the Dutch, the French and the English created huge colonial empires. But while their attitude was very Europe-centric, the legal notion that planting a flag was an act of establishing sovereignty quickly stuck and became accepted worldwide as part and parcel of the law of nations.

Obviously, the astronauts had more important things on their mind than contemplating the legal meaning and consequences of that planted flag, but luckily the issue had been taken care of prior to the mission. Since the beginning of the space race, the United States knew that for many people around the world the sight of a US flag on the Moon would raise major political issues. Any suggestion that the moon might become, legally speaking, part of US backwaters might fuel such concerns, and possibly give rise to international disputes harmful to both the US space program and US interests as a whole.

By 1969, decolonization may have destroyed any notion that non-European parts of the world, though populated, were not civilized and thus justifiably made subject to European sovereignty – however, there was not a single person living on the moon; even life itself was absent.

Still, the simple answer to the question of whether Armstrong and Aldrin by way of their small ceremony did transform the moon, or at least a major part thereof, into US territory turns out to be “no.” They, nor NASA, nor the US government intended the US flag to have that effect.

The first outer space treaty

NASA Lunar Sample Return Container with Lunar soil on display at Space Center Houston Lunar Samples Vault, at NASA’s Johnson Space Center. Credit: OptoMechEngineer/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

Most importantly, that answer was enshrined in the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, to which both the United States and the Soviet Union as well as all other space-faring nations, had become a party. Both superpowers agreed that “colonization” on Earth had been responsible for tremendous human suffering and many armed conflicts that had raged over the last centuries. They were determined not to repeat that mistake of the old European colonial powers when it came to deciding on the legal status of the moon; at least the possibility of a “land grab” in outer space giving rise to another world war was to be avoided. By that token, the moon became something of a “global commons” legally accessible to all countries – two years prior to the first actual manned moon landing.

Case closed, no need for space lawyers anymore then? No need for me to prepare University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s space law students for further discussions and disputes on the lunar law, right? So, the US flag was not a manifestation of claiming sovereignty, but of honouring the US taxpayers and engineers who made Armstrong, Aldrin, and third astronaut Michael Collins’ mission possible. The two men carried a plaque that they “came in peace for all mankind,” and of course Neil’s famous words echoed the same sentiment: his “small step for man” was not a “giant leap” for the United States, but “for mankind.” Furthermore, the United States and NASA lived up to their commitment by sharing the moon rocks and other samples of soil from the lunar surface with the rest of the world, whether by giving them away to foreign governments or by allowing scientists from all over the globe to access them for scientific analysis and discussion. In the midst of the Cold War, this even included scientists from the Soviet Union.

No space lawyers needed?

Not so fast. While the legal status of the Moon as a “global commons” accessible to all countries on peaceful missions did not meet any substantial resistance or challenge, the Outer Space Treaty left further details unsettled. Contrary to the very optimistic assumptions made at the time, so far humankind has not returned to the moon since 1972, making lunar land rights largely theoretical.

That is, until a few years ago when several new plans were hatched to go back to the moon. In addition at least two US companies, Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries, which have serious financial backing, have started targeting asteroids for the purpose of mining their mineral resources. Geek note: Under the aforementioned Outer Space Treaty, the moon and other celestial bodies such as asteroids, legally speaking, belong in the same basket. None of them can become the “territory” of one sovereign state or another.

The very fundamental prohibition under the Outer Space Treaty to acquire new state territory, by planting a flag or by any other means, failed to address the commercial exploitation of natural resources on the moon and other celestial bodies. This is a major debate currently raging in the international community, with no unequivocally accepted solution in sight yet. Roughly, there are two general interpretations possible.

So you want to mine an asteroid?

Countries such as the United States and Luxembourg (as the gateway to the European Union) agree that the moon and asteroids are “global commons,” which means that each country allows its private entrepreneurs, as long as duly licensed and in compliance with other relevant rules of space law, to go out there and extract what they can, to try and make money with it. It’s a bit like the law of the high seas, which are not under the control of an individual country, but completely open to duly licensed law-abiding fishing operations from any country’s citizens and companies. Then, once the fish is in their nets, it is legally theirs to sell.

On the other hand, countries such as Russia and somewhat less explicitly Brazil and Belgium hold that the moon and asteroids belong to humanity as a whole. And therefore the potential benefits from commercial exploitation should somehow accrue for humanity as a whole – or at least should be subjected to a presumably rigorous international regime to guarantee humanity-wide benefits. It’s a bit like the regime originally established for harvesting mineral resources from the deep seabed. Here, an international licensing regime was created as well as an international enterprise, which was to mine those resources and generally share the benefits among all countries.

While in my view the former position certainly would make more sense, both legally and practically, the legal battle by no means is over. Meanwhile, the interest in the moon has been renewed as well – at least China, India and Japan have serious plans to go back there, raising the stakes even higher. Therefore, at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, we will need to teach our students about these issues for many years to come. While ultimately it is up to the community of states to determine whether a common agreement can be reached on either of the two positions or maybe somewhere in between, it is of crucial importance that agreement can be reached one way or another. Such activities developing without any law that is generally applicable and accepted would be a worst-case scenario. While not a matter of colonization anymore, it may have all the same harmful results.

Frans von der Dunk is professor of Space Law, University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Why Are We Going Over the Moon on ISRO and Helium-3 All Over Again?

If we’re going to get excited about ISRO mining the moon for He-3, a fuel that could be used for nuclear fusion, it may be prudent to first produce surplus power from fusionable isotopes – a breakthrough that is still years away.

On July 18, Jitendra Singh, the minister of state (independent charge) for the Department of Space, reaffirmed in the Lok Sabha that the Chandrayaan 2 mission of the Indian Space Research Organisation is not going to mine our natural satellite for helium-3, stating that considerations about the isotope were “outside the scope of the current Moon mission”. He was responding to questions posed by Poonam Mahajan. In light of this confirmation, the following article – first published on June 28 – is being republished.

There has been a surge of ‘news reports’ on various platforms, including Hindustan Times, Financial Express, Deccan Chronicle and the Times of India, talking about the Indian Space Research Organisation’s plans to mine the moon for helium-3 (He-3). It’s unbelievable how quickly we’re having this ‘debate’ again: we don’t know how to use He-3 as a source of energy, a claim that all the reports are using to justify their talking about it. Apparently this isotope can be used in nuclear fusion reactors – conveniently forgetting we’re over a decade away from successfully fusing the lightest fusionable isotopes in an energy-surplus reaction.

All the reports also appear to be rooted in one published by Bloomberg Quint (BQ), which quotes K. Sivan, ISRO chairman, as saying, “The countries which have the capacity to bring that source from the moon to Earth will dictate the process. I don’t want to be just a part of them, I want to lead them.”

Laudable attitude but we are getting carried away here. The idea of mining helium on the moon has been discussed by NASA and the European Space Agency but with far less noise. The BQ report made it okay to talk about He-3 again after the fiasco in April last year, when a slew of reports misquoted a former ISRO scientist to create an unnecessary news cycle, by doing the following: discussing the potential of He-3 fusion to power the world for “250 years”; tying in the responsibilities of the senior-most official of the Indian space programme with an emotional aspiration; and acknowledging that the necessary tech doesn’t yet exist.

This is what climate change reporters would call false balance: giving readers the impression that the article is ‘balanced’ because it makes room for voices from all sides, without stopping to ask whether some of these voices are actually making sense. The moon contains a substance that we think we know how to use – and we are letting this belief bias our decision-making. The moon and multiple near-Earth objects contain lots of materials found much less abundantly on Earth; why are we not hankering after those? Is it only because we don’t yet have reasonable theories at hand about how to exploit them?

ISRO has an impending moon mission, in October/November this year, over the course of which the organisation hopes to deploy its first rover on the lunar surface. So it feels like we’re paying He-3 attention because a) it hasn’t yet been exploited by Earth-based organisations and b) millions of Indians long for ISRO to lead the world one way or another. If we were mere months away from launching a mission to Venus, perhaps we would be seeing a lot of reports about extracting energy from that part of the Solar System.

Even if the project is improbable, could public interest in He-3 mining and fusion at least boost ISRO’s budgetary prospects? It can’t, for three reasons:

1. He-3 fusion is untested technology. Considering prevailing commitments like the Paris Agreement, it would simply be foolish for India to attempt stewarding a nuclear fusion programme involving heavier isotopes when a prototype hydrogen fusion experiment (ITER) itself has sucked in over Rs 96,550 crore (about 9% of which India contributes) while another billion-dollar facility in the US has been struggling to kickstart fusion chain reactions for over four years now.

2. ISRO needs the money for other things (self-explanatory)

3. It’s not why we’re going to the moon – at least, it should not be the reason we’re going to the moon: to extract a ‘fuel’ we we have some ideas about. Instead, the Chandrayaan 2 mission has other, more decidedly laudable, goals and we shouldn’t be worming our way out of trying to understand them and and the nuanced value they promise instead.

A snapshot of publications that carried reports about ISRO planning to mine the moon for He-3. Source: Google News

It’s important to get our reasons right for doing anything, especially when crores of rupees are involved, because they are proxies for the things that people value, which in turn influence policymaking, governance and ultimately the allocation of funds. On the flip side, if this is the kind of messaging that ISRO, and the government behind it, is looking for, then arm yourself with facts and don’t call the mission scientific or judge it for its scientific or technological value.

Additionally, hoping that “the more we talk about new-fangled technologies, the more we will remove it from the realm of abstraction and the closer we will come to realising it” is illogical. While it is good to dream big, drawing upon fashionable ideas from the pages of golden-age science fiction, it is also important to keep our feet on the ground. India has a substantial natural reserve of thorium; that does not mean thorium-fuelled reactors are ready to power the country for hundreds of years.

In the case of He-3 fusion, even technological feasibility, leave alone readiness, is not at hand; it is somewhat like talking about building advanced heavy-water reactors in the early 1930s, after the neutron was discovered but before the Chicago Pile went critical, and with a world war set to change everything – the way climate change is poised to do for our generation. It is not prescience or early adoption as much as speculation and spitballing. It would pay to be more conservative in our choice of goals to pursue if only because, in the short to medium terms, ISRO is neither equipped nor empowered to incentivise blue-sky thinking. This can be further broken down in two ways:

1. Its funds are not allocated for decades at a time, which means the trajectories of its major projects have to be Bayesian – each mission immediately following its predecessor – and often incremental.

2. ISRO is an essentially civilian organisation, which means its goals go hand in hand with strategic and diplomatic advantages sought by the government and from which the organisation can barely deviate.

It is entirely possible that, following this line of sight, He-3 fusion will be in India’s crosshairs as a feasible nuclear fuel in the distant future – but not before that. Supporting technologies whose development and implementation we have a realistic chance of guiding is also what makes us more able to predict the future, and gives us more control over determining long-term research goals and policy directions. In short: if we’re to be heard, we need to make sense. He-3 fusion doesn’t yet make sense, especially in a world that doesn’t have H-2 fusion, and it would be perilous for ISRO to pursue it as if it were because such a choice would come at the cost of various other endeavours there is a demonstrated need to become better at.

Of course, it seems likely that deuterium/tritium fusion will be achieved before the close of this century but that alone wouldn’t open the gate for the entire world to be powered for two or three centuries by a single, non-renewable fuel – and ISRO or any other organisation would do well to not pick something as incredible as that to prove a point about ability and leadership. Dare I mention the India-based Neutrino Observatory?

ISRO Is Not Going to Mine the Moon for Helium-3

Multiple news outlets had quoted Sivathanu Pillai’s statements out of context. The last thing science reporting needs is fake news.

Credit: Ponciano/pixabay

Bengaluru: On April 20, 2017, Livemint reported that the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has plans to mine helium-3 from the Moon to help manage India’s energy needs. ISRO has no such plans. Even if we supposed that it did, they would be grossly premature. There is neither the technology anywhere in the world to use helium-3 to generate energy nor are the legal and logistical hurdles fully understood.

The report is referring to comments made by the noted space scientist Sivathanu Pillai at the Observer Research Foundation’s Kalpana Chawla Space Policy Dialogue 2017, held in New Delhi in February. Those who attended the conference say that Pillai had said mining helium-3 from the Moon was possible – but that he didn’t say anything about ISRO planning to do it.

One attendee put it thus: “He was describing the technological landscape. He reviewed the technology from a century ago and connected it to today, and then he gave a glimpse of the possibilities of tomorrow.”

According to multiple sources on the web, helium-3 is a valuable type of fuel for purportedly ‘cleaner’ nuclear fusion. However, nuclear fusion has not been achieved on Earth even with the lighter, and thus more easily fuseable, atoms of deuterium and tritium, both isotopes of hydrogen.

“Although helium-3 fusion may be an attractive alternative if sufficient quantities can be mined and transported at an economical rate, the main difficulty is technological,” Jayant Murthy, a senior professor at the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Bengaluru, told The Wire. “Helium-3 fusion requires temperatures much higher than the deuterium-tritium fusion that is the basis of current fusion research. It would only be prudent to wait until the technology is mature before even planning for helium-3 extraction from the Moon.”

He added that there were still no commercial fusion reactors even if there have been promising results from attempts to achieve one. For example, the National Ignition Facility, California, has been stepping closer to achieving inertial containment fusion. On the other hand, the multibillion-dollar International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), France (in which India has invested), continues to be delayed with the construction of its magnetic confinement reactor. Neither is designed to work with helium-3, however.

Then again, the technological barrier hasn’t deterred everyone. Public and private enterprises around the world have expressed interest in mining the Moon – either for helium-3 or for lunar water, and perhaps storing the former until a suitable reactor is built. This isotope of helium is not available on Earth because it is emitted by the Sun in its solar wind, and the wind is prevented from reaching Earth’s surface by our magnetic field. The Moon has no such shield and so its surface is believed to have been absorbing helium-3 for eons.

Even others have questioned the wisdom of using helium-3 for nuclear fusion altogether. The most prominent critique was penned by physicist Frank Close for Physics World in August 2007. He wrote that in a reactor like ITER’s tokamak – a donut-shaped hollow in which light atoms are confined by magnetic fields, heated to 150 million degrees C, made to form a plasma and then fused – “deuterium reacts up to 100 times more slowly with helium-3 than it does with tritium”. This is why, as Murthy said, the reactor has to reach temperatures far beyond what are currently being planned. Close concluded writing, “The lunar-helium-3 story is, to my mind, moonshine.”

The ITER tokamak will be used to generate and sustain a plasma (the pink tubular entity) for nuclear fusion. Notice the image of a man on the bottom-left for scale. Credit: US ITER

And then there’s the jurisprudential barrier. According to Ashok G.V., an advocate and space law expert, Moon-mining is a “very, very dicey area”. He explained that the sole legislative document here is the Outer Space Treaty (OST). It permits mining on extraterrestrial bodies subject to a clutch of riders. For example, before it can begin work, ISRO will have to notify all stakeholders of its plans and also consult with those whose operations might be affected by ISRO’s.

And overall, as Ashok put it, “The traditional spacefaring nations have argued that what is not specifically prohibited by the OST is permitted. The resource-restricted agencies like India’s and others have argued that what has not been specifically permitted is prohibited.” The expanding grey area between these two points of view has resulted in calls for the OST to be overhauled.

None of this is to disparage ISRO’s plans to visit the Moon. It’s only that there is much more to explore about the satellite than is visible through the blinders of resource extraction. As Murthy said, “Going to the Moon is justification in itself – it doesn’t require manufactured reasons.”

Shortly after the Livemint story had come online, India TV quoted it in a report of its own, with not a detail changed. In fact, before either publication, the Indo-Asian News Service (IANS), a news syndication agency, had published an article on February 19, 2017, making the same claims: that Pillai had said helium-3 extraction was a “priority programme” for ISRO and that the agency would move to mine, transport and utilise the substance by 2030. This version had been picked up by Financial Express, India Today, Times of India and NDTV, among others. IANS once published a hollow claim that Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity is wrong. The last thing science reporting needs is fake news, and to think these four publications have a combined Twitter following of over 23 million…

The misinterpretation of Pillai’s comments also filled the void of ISRO’s silence, in keeping with its general lack of public engagement. If ISRO doesn’t act like an antibody and clarify its position when stories like these are being written, there is no surprise about the stories going viral.

The author of the Livemint report could not be contacted for comment. This article will be updated as and when a response becomes available.

Note: This article was edited on April 23 to better clarify the status of ITER.