Vol 3 Chapter 302 Jupiter Mining Project

However, starting from the moon, there are more than one and two spacecraft heading to the asteroid belt.

In fact, so far, more than 5,000 spacecraft have taken off from the moon to the asteroid belt and the Kuiper belt to capture asteroids.

In fact, it is not the manufacturing of spaceships that hinders the number of asteroids. In the spaceship manufacturing plant at the Moon Palace Base, there are still nearly a thousand spaceships whose hulls have been processed, waiting to be replenished with nuclear fuel before flying into space.

However, what is most lacking now is actually nuclear fuel.

Because with the continuous improvement of the ship-borne fusion reactor, most of the nuclear materials can be recycled, so the thermal efficiency of the fusion reactor has exceeded 80%.

The energy produced by the fusion reaction is very high, so the nuclear fuel consumed by this kind of traction spacecraft is actually not much. The first and second took off from the shipyard of the moon base, and it took a total of 200 kilograms to pull the asteroid back. of nuclear fuel.

Converted to 5,000 ships, that is 100 tons of nuclear fuel consumption.

Indeed, according to the sampling of the lunar soil obtained from the moon, the helium-3 contained in it can be used by the whole blue star for hundreds of years.

But that is based on refining all the lunar soil of the moon, and the energy consumption of the blue star will not increase.

Extracting helium-3 from the lunar soil is actually not troublesome, and it can be done with a simple distillation method.

But the content of pure helium-3 is actually very low. Even if the entire lunar soil is distilled, it is only a few million tons.

This number seems to be a lot, but considering that the surface area of ​​the moon is as large as the entire Asian continent, and the depth of the lunar soil is several meters deep, the content of such a large volume can be imagined.

For such a long time, the helium-3 extracted from the entire Moon Palace Base has not exceeded 200 tons.

The fusion reactors at the Moon Palace base have gone through five generations, with efficiency ranging from 30% at the beginning to 80% recently.

So far, there have been more than one hundred reactors built on the moon, because the energy consumed by large-scale space exploration and large-scale industrial manufacturing is also extremely terrifying.

Fortunately, there are not many people living on the moon, and there are spirit stones made by solar energy as a supplement. Otherwise, it is only equivalent to the total energy of the United States, and it may not be able to support such a huge industrial production.

These reactors alone consume more than 80 tons of energy, and there is still an energy reserve for emergencies.

Of course, there is another kind of nuclear fuel on the moon, deuterium.

The fusion of deuterium and helium three was originally one of the planned fusion routes on Blue Star.

Although this kind of fusion is far more difficult than deuterium-tritium fusion, requiring higher pressure and higher temperature, its biggest advantage is that it will produce free protons instead of neutrons.

And the water content on the moon is far more than imagined. Even before Yang Qing landed on the moon, some water vapor would often appear on the moon.

In the dark regions of the moon’s north and south poles, there are also permanently frozen ice layers.

Although in most other areas, water only exists in the form of slightly moist lunar soil, but this wet soil alone has surpassed the entire helium-3 reserves of the moon.

Because the moon has no magnetic field and no atmosphere, all solar wind and cosmic rays will directly enter the interior of the lunar soil.

There are many high-energy particles in the solar wind.

High-energy particles will turn the hydrogen atoms in water molecules into deuterium or tritium, and the half-life of tritium is only more than ten years, so the rest of it is protium and deuterium after all.

Although this kind of reaction is slow, it will not last forever. In billions of years, the water on the moon will be full of 20% heavy water.

Humans cannot metabolize heavy water, so the lunar water containing so much heavy water is basically no different from poison to humans.

So if you want to use the water on the moon, there is only one way to get rid of the heavy water.

It happens that the deuterium in heavy water is also an ideal nuclear fusion material.

It’s just that refining heavy water is more difficult than refining helium-3, so the base’s priority is to refine helium-3 in lunar soil.

Although Yang Qing’s technology is advanced, helium 3 is obviously more popular than heavy water, which consumes more energy.

However, as a large amount of lunar soil is refined, helium III, which is relatively easy to extract, still maintains a relatively rapid growth, but their focus has begun to shift to the extraction of deuterium.

In the solar system, there are several relatively large mines for deuterium and helium three.

The biggest and most noticeable thing is naturally the sun, which has more than 90% of the mass of the solar system, and is constantly undergoing nuclear fusion.

There are naturally countless fusion materials on it. Theoretically speaking, the helium-3 on the moon actually comes from the sun.

But the super high temperature and huge gravity make mining from it almost a joke.

However, there are other selections in the solar system, such as the miniature version of the solar system, and Jupiter is one of them.

The composition of Jupiter and the sun is very similar, both are gaseous planets composed of a large amount of hydrogen and helium.

The only difference is that Jupiter’s mass is too small to form continuous nuclear fusion.

Of course, in the atmosphere of Jupiter, there must not be too many easily fused atoms like deuterium and helium III. Otherwise, the intensity of the comet impact in 1994 in the last century would have exceeded the explosion of millions of atomic bombs. There is no fusion reaction that causes Jupiter.

However, due to the huge size of Jupiter and the huge amount of solar wind it has received for so many years, the amount of helium-III contained in it is absolutely considerable.

Jupiter also does not have the temperature of the sun, but only has a huge gravitational force, which is not difficult for the moon palace base spacecraft that can isolate the gravitational force.

So to Jupiter, it becomes possible to absorb gas from its atmosphere and filter out the desired nuclear material.

But compared to collecting gas from Jupiter, UU Reading www. uukanshu.com Going to the ocean planets Ganymede and Callisto, digging ice directly seems to be a simpler matter.

Both Ganymede and Callisto are similar in size to Mercury, and Ganymede is even larger than Mercury.

However, they are much lighter than Mercury, and their composition is similar to that of water and rock.

They are covered with an ice layer with a thickness of nearly 100 kilometers. Among them, Ganymede also has a magnetic circle that the satellites of the solar system do not have, and a relatively weak oxygen-containing atmosphere.

Because of these performances, it is theoretically possible to have life.

However, Yang Qing has never doubted alien life, and even if there is life on Ganymede, it is in some relatively low-level forms, such as fungi or certain anaerobic bacteria, relying on the hot springs under the Ganymede Ocean to provide life. It is basically impossible for advanced intelligent life like humans to appear.

Yang Qing valued the huge water source above them.

The water content of a satellite is even more than that of the entire blue star, which makes them bound to become the water source of the solar system in the future.

Compared with the uncertainty of comets, their positions are fixed and their gravitational force is small. Except that Ganymede is in the interior of Jupiter’s gravitational circle and is greatly affected by gravitational force, there are almost no obstacles to ice mining.

After the mined ice melts, the heavy water will be separated directly, and the light water will either replenish the Moon Palace base, or be sent directly to Mars. The future demand for light water in these two places will be almost endless.

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