- The U.S. is missing an opportunity to literally change the world. China is all over it
- The Moon may ultimately become the most important energy resource in human history
- Americans love rockets. But rockets aren’t space. Rockets are simply how you get to space to do the space stuff
Space is back, haven’t you heard?
After decades away from manned deep-space exploration, the United States at long last sent a crewed mission back to the Moon earlier this year.
Did it, though? Not really.
Artemis II went close to the Moon — moon-adjacent, if you will. The astronauts swung around the Moon at an altitude of roughly 4,000 miles, performed a single lunar flyby without entering lunar orbit, took photos like tourists on the ferry to Ellis Island, then came straight back again.
If I go to Jersey City and look out at Lower Manhattan on the other side of the Hudson, did I go to Manhattan?
I did not.
The mission was still an achievement — just not the one NASA, the media and much of the American public wanted it to be. You cannot manifest a heroic Apollo-style voyage out of what was, in essence, a systems-validation exercise for Artemis’ life-support, navigation and deep-space operations.
This matters because it obscures and delays the mission America should actually be undertaking in outer space.
What mission is that, Steve-o?
Glad you asked, reader.
Helium - not hot air
The Moon — the place Artemis II didn’t quite go — contains the raw material capable of transforming human civilization, ending the fossil-fuel age and opening an era of effectively limitless clean energy.
It is called helium-3.
Scattered across the lunar surface are roughly a million tons of this material, with the potential to power next-generation fusion reactors capable of producing immense amounts of energy with almost no radioactive waste.
In other words, the Moon may not be a destination; it may be a power source — and a critical layer in the emerging digital-economic stack.
Think Saudi Arabia for the Solar System, but without the human rights violations, oil, sand and camels.
Deposited across the lunar surface by billions of years of solar wind, helium-3 is an extraordinarily rare – on Earth-- isotope with the potential to power a new generation of fusion reactors at a planetary scale. If fusion engineers can make it work commercially, helium-3 could deliver immense amounts of energy with minimal radioactive waste and enough power to fundamentally reshape industrial civilization.
The implications are staggering.
A world powered by fusion would not merely be cleaner. It would be richer, more abundant and more technologically ambitious. Energy scarcity — the hidden constraint behind much of modern geopolitics, industrial limitation and environmental anxiety — could begin to recede for the first time in human history.
And the Moon, sitting only 238,855 miles from Earth, may become the first great energy frontier of the space age.
In cosmic terms, the Moon is astonishingly close. Light reaches it in just 1.3 seconds. Apollo astronauts made the journey in roughly three days. It is not another galaxy or some distant science-fiction abstraction. It is, effectively, Earth’s orbital backyard and potential power station.
Which changes the way one should think about it entirely.
The Moon is not merely a barren rock hanging romantically in the night sky. It may ultimately prove to be an industrial resource, an energy reservoir and the first off-world asset of the human economy.
Of course, humanity still has to crack commercially viable fusion. But for the first time in decades, advances in AI, simulation, robotics and eventually quantum computing may finally accelerate progress toward workable reactor designs.
Scientists first identified helium-3 on the Moon in the 1980s — which rather begs the question: why didn’t we start mining it then? And why isn’t America rushing to mine it now?
The Martian chronically ill
The answer is that the modern space narrative is no longer driven primarily by engineering logic or national strategy. It is increasingly shaped by billionaire egos, Silicon Valley branding and science-fiction cosplay masquerading as industrial policy.
Much of modern Silicon Valley futurism suffers from an inability to distinguish between technological spectacle and actual systems thinking. Rockets become theatre. Colonization becomes branding. Engineering constraints are treated as public-relations inconveniences rather than immovable physical realities. Entire visions of the future are constructed around vanity, vibes, memes and science-fiction aesthetics rather than coherent planetary-scale operational logic.
On the scale of hyperbole, the fuss surrounding Artemis II was almost restrained compared with the extravagant nonsense executives such as Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos now routinely speak about in relation to space.
The universe may be infinite, but so, apparently, is the volume of bullshit Big Tech executives are capable of talking about it.
Musk, especially, is intent on selling the public on Mars — a freezing, radiation-soaked death desert with almost no atmosphere, toxic soil chemistry, weak gravity and no meaningful magnetic field.
Every breath you take, every move you make, Mars will be watching you — and working out how to kill you. Is there life on Mars? No, there bloody well isn’t, for a slew of reasons.
Yet Musk has promised to put a million people on Mars within the next decade. A million dead people, maybe.
You first, Elon.
At some level, Musk must know his Mars plan is nonsense. But hey, he has a SpaceX IPO to inflate.
At the same time, Jeff Bezos, cowboy and warehouse wizard, is advocating for data centers and heavy industry in space without actually doing much to make them actually happen.
All of which takes America’s eye off helium-3.
Which is a mistake for the ages.
Because once commercially viable fusion arrives — and it now looks increasingly possible — helium-3 instantly stops being a scientific curiosity and becomes the most valuable strategic resource in the Solar System.
In the absence of a serious American national program, only two startups are currently attempting to harvest helium-3 from the Moon. ispace in Japan has raised roughly $196 million. Interlune in the U.S. has raised around $30 million and has already pushed its target timeline for mining lunar regolith into the 2030s.
By comparison, Artemis II reportedly cost roughly $4 billion to send one rocket to not land four humans on the Moon.
You do the math.
In the meantime, China is doing what China does best: architecting the full industrial stack required to actually build the future.
That means lining up the supply chains, robotics, launch systems, laser-optic space comms, lunar infrastructure, energy systems and state-backed industrial coordination required to make helium-3 harvesting real.
This is a space-hardened version of the terrestrial Unified Infrastructure Era model - in which energy systems, communications networks, cloud platforms, AI inference and industrial operations cease to exist as separate sectors and instead converge into one continuously orchestrated operational fabric.
More importantly still, China is not merely ahead in the lunar supply chain. It is already somewhere between ten and fifteen years ahead of the United States in next-generation nuclear fission deployment itself.
That is not a coincidence.
Beijing has poured billions into advanced fission because it understands something much of the West still does not: fusion and helium-3 are not separate conversations. They are part of the same long-term civilizational and industrial energy strategy.
China is trying to close the loop: Fission today. Fusion tomorrow. Lunar helium-3 after that.
As America’s Big Tech broligarchy chats shit and its government picks ill-advised fights in the Middle East, China invents, builds, executes and quietly positions itself for an existential victory in a fight that the United States seems to barely realize it is part of.
If helium-3 truly is the energy source capable of powering the next era of civilization, then the country that controls it may ultimately control the future itself. At this point in its history, it is looking spectacularly unlikely that that will be the United States of America.
Stephen M. Saunders MBE is a communications analyst and USPTO-registered inventor examining how digital infrastructure — 5G, cloud, and AI — is reshaping industry, power and society, as well as underpinning the emerging, ubiquitous global digital economy. As anchor of FNTV and a longtime industry insider, he focuses less on growth narratives and more on execution, risk and how hyperscale technology is distorting markets, governance and society at scale.
Opinion pieces from industry experts, analysts or our editorial staff do not represent the opinions of Fierce Network.