re: NASA: Humans will prove we are not alone in the universe within 20 years.

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Studies on this show it would take refining millions of tons worth of lunar soil to amass enough Helium 3 for fusion generation. Not to mention the cost in a revolving door of shuttles going back and forth. This would render energy cost just as expensive as current methods.

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It's much cleaner though, and the sooner we learn to refine it properly, the sooner we are less fricked when our oil runs out. Imagine if we get anywhere close to running out while all of humanity is still on Planet Earth. That would mean our extinction.

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Where will we manufacture these spaceships that launch from the moon? There? You would need entire industries established. Or perhaps build it on Earth, and launch multiple shuttles to assemble it piece by piece on the moon?

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Actually, you build it in Earth's or the Moon's orbit (like we did the ISS) and then put the shuttles on the Moon. The point is we'd probably have to launch from a surface to go to the cosmos, and the Moon's surface is much, much more practical to launch a vehicle out of Earth's orbit than Earth itself. It would require a very small fraction of the fuel costs.

In the Apollo 11 mission, this is what we launched off the Moon with:



Now this is what we launched off the Earth with:



See why it may be cheaper to assemble these things from orbit and launch them from the Moon? Granted, they'd be bigger than the Apollo 11 Lunar Module, but they'd require no where near the fuel that was required to launch Apollo 11 and especially a vehicle traveling towards Mars and beyond from the Earth.

Put them on Virgin Galactic, put them to a space station orbiting the Earth, then have another space vehicle transport them to the Moon, and then said vehicle launches from the Moon, and you save greatly.