The Return of the Black Technology of Immortal World

However, there are more than two spacecrafts departing from the moon to go to the asteroid belt.

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

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

However, what is most lacking now is nuclear fuel.

Because with the continuous improvement of shipboard fusion reactors, most nuclear raw materials can be recycled, so the thermal efficiency of fusion reactors has exceeded 80%.

The energy generated by the fusion reaction is very high, so the nuclear fuel consumed by this kind of towing spacecraft is actually not much. From the time No. 1 and No. 2 took off from the shipyard of the moon base to pulling the asteroid back, it only cost a total of 200 kilograms. of nuclear fuel.

Converted to five thousand ships, that is one hundred tons of nuclear fuel consumption.

Indeed, according to the samples of lunar soil obtained from the moon, the helium-3 contained in it can last the Blue Star for hundreds of years.

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

Extracting helium-3 from the lunar soil is actually not troublesome. It can be done using a simple distillation method.

But the content of pure helium-3 is actually very low. Even if the entire lunar soil was distilled, it would only be 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 also several meters deep, one can imagine the content of such a large volume.

For so long, the helium-3 extracted in the entire Moon Palace Base has not exceeded 200 tons.

The fusion reactor at the Moon Palace Base has been through five generations, with efficiency ranging from the initial 30% to the latest 80%.

So far, more than a hundred reactors have been 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 also spiritual stones made from solar energy as a supplement. Otherwise, it would only be 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, leaving energy reserves for emergencies.

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

The fusion of deuterium and helium 3 is one of the fusion routes designed 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 produces free protons instead of neutrons.

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

There are also permanently frozen ice layers in the dark areas of the moon's north and south poles.

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

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 these solar winds.

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 what is left is protium and deuterium after all.

Although this reaction is slow, it cannot last forever. Over billions of years, the moon's water content will be fully 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 moon's water, there is only one way to get rid of heavy water.

It just so 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 the lunar soil.

Although Yang Qing's technology is advanced, helium-3 is obviously more favored than heavy water, which consumes more energy.

However, as a large amount of lunar soil was refined, helium-3, which was easier to extract, still maintained a relatively rapid growth, but their focus began to shift to the extraction of deuterium.

In the solar system, there are several relatively large mines for deuterium and helium-3.

The largest and most eye-catching one is naturally the sun. It has more than 90% of the mass of the solar system and is constantly undergoing nuclear fusion.

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

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

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

The compositions of Jupiter and the Sun are very similar. They are both gaseous planets composed of large amounts of hydrogen and helium.

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

Of course, there certainly won’t be too many easily fusion atoms like deuterium and helium-3 in Jupiter’s atmosphere. Otherwise, in the last century, the comet impact in 1994 would have been more intense than the explosion of millions of atomic bombs, but it would not have been enough. Did not cause fusion reactions on Jupiter.

However, due to Jupiter's huge size and the huge amount of solar wind it has received for so many years, the amount of helium-3 contained in it is absolutely considerable.

Jupiter does not have the same temperature as the Sun. It only has a huge gravity. It is not a difficulty for the Moon Palace base spacecraft that can isolate the gravity.

So it becomes possible to go to Jupiter, absorb gases from its atmosphere, and filter out the desired nuclear materials.

However, compared to collecting gas from Jupiter, it seems to be a simpler matter to directly dig ice on the ocean planets such as Ganymede and Callisto.

Ganymede and Callisto are both similar in size to Mercury, with Ganymede even larger than Mercury.

However, they are much lighter than Mercury, and their compositions are similar to water and rock.

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

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

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

What Yang Qing values ​​​​is the huge water source above them.

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

Compared with the uncertainty of comets, their positions are fixed and their gravity is small. Apart from considering that Ganymede is inside Jupiter's gravitational circle and is subject to a greater gravitational influence, there are almost no obstacles to ice harvesting.

After the extracted ice melts, the heavy water is directly separated, and the light water is either replenished at the Moon Palace Base, or sent directly to Mars. The future demand for light water in these two places is almost endless.