Video transcript

NEWS ITEMS: The eyes of the world now look into space. A giant leap for mankind. All systems are go.

V/O: After forty years, man is going back to the Moon.

V/O: Across the world scientists are gearing up to take part in what's been called a second Moon race.

V/O: Behind it there's a growing belief that there might be something on the Moon that could provide the Earth with almost unlimited clean power for the next thousand years.

V/O: In search of new forms of power, scientists have long tried to reproduce on Earth what happens in the Sun.

SCIENTIST: Could you start the countdown please?

COUNTDOWN: Ten, nine, eight...

V/O: Like all stars, the Sun is fuelled by a process known as nuclear fusion.

COUNTDOWN: Three, two, one, zero.

V/O: But there is one major problem with re-creating nuclear fusion here on Earth. The reaction damages the chamber it's created in. It's one of the main obstacles to using fusion as a reliable long-term source of energy.

V/O: But Jerry Kulcinski believes he may have found an answer.

V/O: In an attempt to make the fusion reaction less destructive, he has introduced a new substance into the fusion process. It's a gas, called Helium-3.

JERRY KULCINSKI: We actually are bringing in helium-3 through this tube, which is connected to a helium-3 cylinder and we think a device like this could run for the lifetime of the reactor.

V/O: Despite the success of his experiments, Kulcinski is aware that his approach to nuclear fusion requires large amounts of Helium-3. But Helium-3 is extremely scarce. The only source on Earth comes from decommissioned nuclear weapons.

V/O: Helium-3 is a gas ejected from the surface of the Sun.

V/O: When it reaches the Earth, it's blocked by the atmosphere. But on a planet like the Moon, where there's no atmosphere, it's trapped by the lunar soil.

HARRISON SCHMITT: At first blush using the most conservative figures for the amount of helium-3 that's in the soils of the Moon - what we call the regolith - there's about a million tons. That's a lot of helium.

JERRY KULCINSKI: It's only within the last few decades that we've ever thought about the Moon as being a large source of energy. In fact it may be the Persian Gulf of the 21st century.

HARRISON SCHMITT: A metric ton of helium-3 would supply about one-sixth of the energy needs today of the British Isles. It would supply ten million people in a large modern city for a year. It would over the long haul replace electrical power production, not only fossil fuels, but would replace nuclear power as we now understand it, fission power. So there are really very few disadvantages other than it's tough to do.

V/O: Despite the huge obstacles involved, former Apollo astronaut, Harrison Schmitt, and Kulcinski have teamed up to realise an extraordinary idea: to strip-mine the Moon and transport Helium-3 as a liquefied gas a quarter of a million miles back to Earth.

HARRISON SCHMITT: It's not a madman's dream to go the Moon and access its resources. We have been there, we know how to do it. We can estimate the cost. That's not a madman's dream.

V/O: Like Schmitt, Edgar Mitchell is also a former Apollo astronaut. But his experience of visiting the Moon has led him to draw almost exactly the opposite conclusion to Schmitt's.

EDGAR MITCHELL: There are those who believe that expanding outward and using the resources of the rest of our solar system are what we should do, and perhaps in due course we will have to do that. But first we have got to learn to live within our means here, to live within the resources that we have instead of just saying, well, we can consume all we want and then we'll go to the next planet and consume all of that and the next planet and consume all of that.

V/O: It's not a view Schmitt has much time for.

HARRISON SCHMITT: Some people might say that it was immoral to benefit from the resources of the Moon. I personally think it would be immoral not to have those resources available in the most timely way possible and so I think the moral question is more on the other side.

JERRY KULCINSKI: If we had gold bricks stacked up on the surface of the Moon, we couldn't afford to bring them back. This material, at several billion dollars a ton, is what makes it all worthwhile. There is nothing that we know of in the solar system that is worthwhile going out to get to bring back to the Earth other than helium-3.

EDGAR MITCHELL: Frankly we in our knowledge base - as far as how the universe works - we're just barely out of the trees. So we are pretty naïve. We think we know a lot more than we do.