When government imagines a reason to spend money, it can be very hard to make it stop. Elon Musk is soon to find this out. Stopping can take a very long time, even when the government didn’t need to spend the money at all. Consider what happened after oil men drilled a well under William Greenwell’s farm outside Dexter, Kansas, in 1903.

The well — what oil men called a “howling gasser” — spewed some nine million cubic feet of gas per day. But to the disappointment of the townspeople, it wouldn’t burn. Curious chemists found that it was only 15% methane. Seventy-two percent was nitrogen, which doesn’t burn. Among the remaining inert residue, they found nearly two percent was helium.

This news was of little interest to anyone but chemists. Helium is the second most abundant element in the universe but extremely rare on Earth. Traces had been found in a few minerals but none as a gas, and for a simple reason. Helium molecules are tiny — the escape artists of the periodic table. Release them and they will rise into space, Earth’s gravity unable to stop them.

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