We do not need He3 for Earth (it would be useful for space travel). Here is a better bet:

Bussard Fusion Reactor
Easy Low Cost No Radiation Fusion

It has been funded:

Bussard Reactor Funded

I have inside info that is very reliable and multiply confirmed that validates the above story. I am not at liberty to say more. Expect a public announcement from the Navy in the coming weeks.

The above reactor can burn Deuterium which is very abundant and produces lots of neutrons or it can burn a mixture of Hydrogen and Boron 11 which does not.

The implication of it is that we will know in 6 to 9 months if the small reactors of that design are feasible.

If they are we could have fusion plants generating electricity in 10 years or less depending on how much we want to spend to compress the time frame.

BTW Bussard is not the only thing going on in IEC. There are a few government programs at Los Alamos National Laboratory, MIT, the University of Wisconsin and at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana among others.

How disappointing that Gordon finds it hard to see Americans getting excited about returning to the Moon. Evidently he was not a Heinlein fan in his youth. I am at a loss to understand how any rational thinker can doubt the human race's need to explore the solar system and beyond.

Think of it! Low-gee habitations on the Moon could allow corporate law profs to live to ages rivaling Methuselah, thereby to share their wisdom across many more generations than exclusively terrestrial lifespans allow. Is that not a worthy goal?

I'm as much of a space nut as anyone, but this talk about sending humans to tehj moon and Mars drives me bonkers:

(1) the moon has very low scientific value (in the 60s and 70s we pretty much figured out the moon isn't a terribly interesting place);

(2) a base or stop on the moon doesn't help us get to Mars (because the stopping and starting would use more fuel than any savings, according to coverage I've seen); and

(3) we're not remotely close to figuring out how humans could survive the cosmic ray exposure in space to survive a trip to Mars (even assuming we solve the propulsion/fuel technology problems of such a long trip);

(4) robotics have gotten so good that we can learn far more from the many many robot missions around the solar system that we could afford if we skipped this fantasy of humans exploring Mars in any of our lifetimes.

Another reason to do many more robot missions before sending humans to Mars: about half our robot missions to Mars crashed or missed the planet altogether. So just landing humans is too hard for us, even setting aside the problem of the return trip and keeping them alive in space.

All worthy questions, but too skeptical for my taste. Ferdinand and Isabella likely had courtiers in 1492 who similarly warned against placing trust in a Genoese sea captain.

Exploration does offer opportunities that an essential segment of the human population welcomes. It seems premature to hand the baton to robots, even if the video game generation is amenable to remote control.