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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."
Moon Base here we come!
And that other Zappa kid too.
The moon has no outer shell (well, it does, but the difference is only in density and compound).
It's not harder to dig as you go (on Earth you have more problems with heat and earthquakes the lower you go), and the composition is pretty much the same all around (no iron core).
Summary:
You will never 'run out of moon'
Even if you eat up 25% of it, you could still just as easily continue mining the rest. You'll probably only ruin the ecology of Earth (by the time you mine a large mass of the moon, you'd have built space cities bigger than the current Earth population).
"The moon's mass is approximately 7.35e22 kg with a density about 3/5 that of Earth"
It's not 40% iron like Earth.
Let's say it's 0.1% metal (usable, refined, post-processed metal)
that's 7.35e19 kg of metal.
The Empire state building weighs 365,000 tons
That's 3.65e8 kg (yeah, I know it's not metal)
So, the moon will provide: (perl, make it so:)
201,369,863,013.699 empire state buildings.
201 billion, 369 million, 863 thousand and 13 sky scrapers
My other