Liquid Oxygen from Lunar Rocks

SIInudeity writes "A South African chemical engineer has come up with a way to produce liquid oxygen from lunar rock. Oosthuizen is a co-inventor of the Ilmenox process, named after the process' ability to produce oxygen from the lunar mineral ilmenite. The process extracts oxygen from moonrock, which are metal-oxides that may contain up to 30 or 40% oxygen. By means of electro-chemical equipment, which has now been patented, the oxygen and the metal in the moonrock are split."

Comments

Great news

[squiggleslash]

I think I speak for everyone when I say that terraforming the moon has to be a major priority if we're to, erm, get away from this planet.

Anyway, all we need now is a way to increase the mass of the moon by about 6x, so the moon has a gravity similar to Earth's. Then it can hold an atmosphere, and we'll be able to make better use of it, like turn it into a huge vacation destination or something.

Re:Long term environmental impact.

[MindStalker]

We then travel from world to world extracting all of their natural resources and enslaving their populations.

That's great news.

[CodeMonkey4Hire]

So by the time we start using the moon as a base for traveling to Mars, the patents will have expired and we can use the tech for free. Thanks! (Sometimes researching years ahead of the need doesn't pay off.)