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Helium-3 is clean, it is non-radioactive, it does not produce radioactivity, it is converted to electricity at about twice the efficiency of other forms of energy production

A metric ton of Helium-3 would supply about one-sixth of the energy needs today of the British Isles. It would supply 10 million people in a large modern city; just one metric ton of Helium-3, for a year.

Helium-3 is not present in any significant quantity naturally on Earth. A little bit of it is produced by the decay of tritium, when tritium is produced for nuclear weapons and, potentially, other purposes.

But there is not a sufficient terrestrial supply of Helium-3 to be useful to us. The Moon soils contain Helium-3 at significant concentrations, economic concentrations.

Using the most conservative figures for the amount of Helium-3 that's in the soils of the Moon, what we call the regolith of the Moon, there is about a million tons, globally, around the Moon, metric tons. That's a lot of helium, and it would run power plants for a long time here on Earth.

If the Earth had a ready supply, and a continuous supply of Helium-3, it would, over the long haul, replace for electrical power production, I think not only fossil fuels, coal, particularly, but would replace nuclear power, as we now understand it, fission power as well.

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Until we know what the Moon is really all about, the idea of trying to commercialise it is, in my opinion, a misplaced idea.

Let's go back and explore and find out what we really have to do, what really - what resources are really available and what alternatives we have.

We have a very serious problem of sustainability on this planet. The simplest way to say it is, it does not matter which measure of human activity you look at, it's on an exponential growth curve.

And it's quite clear that you cannot continue indefinitely with exponential change in a finite space. And we have a finite planet. And there are those who believe that expanding outward and using the resources of the rest of our Solar System and our planet are what we should do and, perhaps, in due course, we will have to do that. But first, we have to learn to live within our means here, to live within resources that we have. And instead of just saying, well, we can consume all we want, then we'll go to the next planet and consume all of that, and the next planet, and consume all of that.

In the next 20 years, if we go back to the Moon in that period, the most important thing we can do is continue our exploration and to continue our science, and understand that little planet, that little satellite of Earth better than we do now. We just barely are starting to understand it.