The last man to walk on the moon says he can’t explain what it was like up there but that more and more people may learn soon enough — thanks to a trillion-dollar industry hidden in the lunar dust.
Dr. Harrison “Jack” Schmitt, 90, an Apollo 17 astronaut who spent three days on the moon in 1972, told The Post this week that there is a superfuel locked within the lunar dust that could provide Earth with an abundance of clean and safe energy for generations.
“I’ve been working on this for many decades — harvesting the light isotope of helium-3 from the moon,” said Schmitt, who is from New Mexico and lives in Albuquerque.
“I’ve been working on this since the mid ’80s, and this was the first time where I’ve really been convinced that there’s a viable business case.”
Schmitt said seeing Artemis II recently fly four more astronauts to the moon gave him hope that the establishment of bases there — and regular flights back and forth — are closer than ever, paving the way for such a lucrative industry.
He said he believes such frequent space travel will finally be a reality within the next few years, allowing more and more people to experience what he did in 1972.
Schmitt said he himself struggles to convey what it was like to walk on the lunar surface.
“It’s almost impossible to transfer the experience,” he said.
“But one analogy would be, if you’ve ever been to the Grand Canyon and you walk up to the rim, and you see it for the first time.
“It’s sort of that kind of a experience, where being there is the essential human ingredient.
“I studied what other missions had done, I helped train the people, I heard the debriefings and everything like that — but it’s nothing like being there.”
Schmitt is one of just 12 humans to ever walk on the moon, and four who are still alive. Buzz Aldrin, Charlie Duke and David Scott are also all in their 90s.
Since his Apollo 17 commander, Gene Cernan, died in 2017, Schmidt has been the last man alive to step off the lunar surface.
He also stands out for another reason: Unlike the other Apollo astronauts, who came from the military, Schmitt was a geologist and the only trained scientist to make the historic trip.
He was first selected as an astronaut in 1965 after developing a NASA program to teach field geology to lunar explorers, which would become one of their primary objectives on the moon.
Schmitt worked directly with every Apollo mission from 8 through 13, until he began training as a backup crewmember for 15.
He was then squeezed onto the prime crew for Apollo 17 when budget cuts canceled missions 18 through 20.
Schmidt said Artemis II further fueled his love of all things lunar.
“It’s great to see these folks not only enjoying themselves but getting a whole bunch of new information about the far side of the moon,” Schmitt said.
“That’s very, very important to get the momentum again.
“The question is, will that momentum keep going forward?”
Schmitt says he believes it will through a viable business model for interlunar travel — fueled by an industry involving the reaping of helium-3.
Helium-3 is a key ingredient needed to run nuclear fusion reactors, which operate with extreme efficiency and without the dangerous radioactive waste today’s fission-based power plants create.
But helium-3 is extremely rare on Earth — so rare that it’s rationed by the federal government — meaning fusion reactors have never been viable on a large scale.
But the moon is believed to be ripe with it, since the sun has been bombarding its atmosphere-free surface with the isotope for billions of years and building it up in the grey lunar dust.
Harvesting it could be a trillion-dollar industry providing humanity with clean and safe energy for generations, Schmitt said.
As a result, he co-founded a business, Interlune, that’s developing the technologies to make it happen.
“We think the business case has finally made it,” Schmitt said, explaining the process of extracting helium-3 from moondust is more akin to agricultural harvesting than mining.
“We think that certainly by the mid-2030s, if not sooner, we should be bringing shipments of helium-3 back to Earth.”
He said his trip to the moon only “reinforced” his beliefs in the power of science.
“I’m very fortunate, privileged to have been involved,” the astronaut said.
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