Return to the Moon: Exploration, Enterprise, and Energy in the Human Settlement of Space

Published by Copernicus Books, an imprint of Springer Science+Business Media. Apollo 17 lunar module pilot and geologist Harrison “Jack” Schmitt — the only professional scientist to walk on the Moon, and later a U.S. Senator from New Mexico — lays out a chapter-by-chapter case for a commercially financed return to the Moon built around mining lunar helium-3 as fuel for terrestrial fusion power, working through booster and fusion-power economics, lunar mining and settlement costs, NASA restructuring, space law, and the human factors of long-duration lunar work; one chapter revisits the Apollo 1 fire as a management case study.

In his foreword, Neil Armstrong traces the history of humanity’s understanding of the Sun’s energy, from nineteenth-century miscalculations through the discovery of nuclear fission and fusion, as scientific backdrop for Schmitt’s helium-3 argument.