Free Republic

The 2009 indie film Moon features Sam Rockwell as an employee (named Sam) of the fictional Lunar Industries, a mining corporation back on Earth. Just wrapping a three-year solitary stint on the moon, Sam is charged with overseeing the automated harvesters which extract helium-3 from the lunar regolith. Canisters of the harvested helium-3 are then sent to Earth to be used to generate fusion energy.

A slim cable for a space elevator has been built stretching a mile into the sky, enabling robots to scrabble some way up and down the line. LiftPort Group, a private US company on a quest to build a space elevator by April 2018, stretched the strong carbon ribbon 1 mile (1.6 km) into the sky from the Arizona desert outside Phoenix in January tests, it announced on Monday. The company's lofty objective will sound familiar to followers of NASA's Centennial Challenges programme. The desired outcome is a 62,000-mile (99,779 km) tether that robotic lifters – powered by laser beams...