Say if there was enough helium 3 is this just a buck rogers fantasy about getting to mars in 3 days? http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.08/helium.html If this is true the consequences could be amazing, we could get to the next nearest star in about 5 weeks at that rate surely we should urge for more helium production - there must be other sources
No. Helium is an inert gas, meaning it doesnt light on fire. The use of it as a rocket fuel is a stupid idea. Hydrogen is the fuel of the future. You can quote me on that.
Well you wont find any Helium 3 on Earth. It will be produced in trace amounts in our Fusion reactors but nothing more. The only way to produce it is to fuse Hydrogen I would have thought and as the article mentions some form radioactive decay, but I would have though that would be regular Helium. I wouldn't be too keen for people to quote you on saying that Helium is a crap fuel, true it doesn't burn, but for fusion its only bettered by Hydrogen.
Well no shit. Thats like saying "my lighter only lights when theres gas" Add a flammable gas to any non flammable gas and voila its flammable.
Fusion and combustion are not the same thing. Helium doesn't burn even with combustible gases. Mix Hydrogen, Oxygen and Helium stick a match in and you will end up with water and Helium. But thats beside the point, the fact it doesn't burn is completely irrelevant.
Are you saying they carnt produce enough to make a rocket powered by it? The artical says we could get it from the sun but wont that be hard to do? I just dont know how these scientists do things, they have crazey ideas that sometimes work
Most Helium on Earth is helium-4. This is found in gas pockets usually at the top of oil wells or natural gas pockets. Once in the atmosphere Helium floats into space so there is basically no Helium in the atmosphere. This means the only place we can get Helium 3 is from the sun, I don't know but I guess a fair amount escapes in the solar wind.
Not really. As has been pointed out its inert so we cant get it out of compounds on Earth the same way we can get Hydrogen or Oil. Theres no practical way to get things as light as Helium 3 from fission as far as I know or even if there was not really a mass production technique. In all honestly id be suprised if any advantage was enough of an improvement of Hydrogen to make it worth while.
I thought I knew what this meant - but this is a new context for me I will look that up as to what inert gasses are and why they cant be manufactured
Ill elaborate it was a subtle point, it doesn't necessarily mean you don't understand inert. Take Hydrogen, similar to Helium in its physical size, so it rises rapidly in the Earths atmosphere and could escape into space. So why do we have plenty of hydrogen but next to no helium (much less rare isotopes). The difference is that our hydrogen is mostly in the form of water and organic molecules and other assorted compounds, there is almost no pure hydrogen in the Earths atmosphere.So the reason we have hydrogen is because it reacts very readily to form other compounds that stay firmly on Earth.
