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

MoonBase!

[MindStalker]

Moon Base here we come!

And that other Zappa kid too.

Glossed over in the summary

[wowbagger]

Glossed over in the /. summary is the fact that the output of this process is not JUST LO2, but also titanium (and presumably aluminum) metal, as well.

So not only do you get air to breath, you get materials with which to build your base.

Set up a base running this process, add a Lunar beanstalk to L1, and you have a cheap source of material for building items in Earth orbit.

I wonder if adding a spinner (i.e. a cable in orbit, the ends of which do not terminate on any celestial body but instead are allowed to rotate freely) could be used to reduce the delta-V even furthur - use the lunar beanstalk to launch to earth orbit, rendezvousing with the spinner to get the delta-V to enter LEO, and storing the energy in the spinner to launch items later.

Re:Glossed over in the summary

[Rei]

There's something that I don't get about this article. Current aluminum and titanium ARE refined electrolytically. What did this person do, apart from try to capture the oxygen? Did this person simply "invent" the addition of a pump and tank? Because that's what it sounds like.

The problems with electrolytic refinement on a moon base are significant. First off, there's the mass issues; aluminum oxide is dissolved in molten cryolite (I'm not sure what they do for titanium). To build any significant sized refinement plant would not just involve the heavy vessels to contain the molten minerals (plus the crushers, conveyors, moulds, cranes, and all other associated equipment), but also shipping many tons of cryolite to the moon.

Secondly, there's the biggest limitation of refining on Earth: power costs. Refining separating that are this tightly bound to oxygen takes a *lot* of energy. Something like 70% of aluminum refining costs are simply to pay for electricity. Sure, there are ample potential sources of energy on the moon, but we have to pay to *ship the equipment to harness them up*, which is incredibly expensive.

Forget about exporting back to earth - lunar titanium and aluminum will cost an utter fortune because power will cost an utter fortune because the capital costs will be an utter fortune.

If we want to lower capital costs on the moon, we'll have to basically recreate almost all major pieces of human industry on the moon. That's such a huge task, it boggles the mind to try and picture it. Sure, as we progress, it becomes easier to advance lunar industry (when we can make aluminum pipes, those no longer need to be shipped; when we can make aluminum housing panels and I-beams, they no longer need to be shipped; when we can make a solder, that no longer needs to be shipped; etc). However, for most of its history, we'll still have to ship a sizable portion of its ever-expanding needs. And some things, they'll always need to import; the moon is very rich in some minerals, but compared to earth, it doesn't have much mineral diversity.

Sure, we can make aluminum structural materials and fiberglass insulation natively on the moon. But where's our copper for electronics? Where's our carbon and our nitrogen needed for life? Where's our hydrogen needed for almost everything (in the best lunar samples it was only 63.6 ppm)? The moon is sorely lacking.

Mind you, I support building a moonbase. I think it's pure idiocy to plan to try to establish all of these technologies in practice for the first time 3 months away from earth on Mars. However, I don't see the moon becoming remotely economically self-sustainable in our lifetimes, nor our children's (unless of course that society that thinks we'll all live around 1000 years is right ;) ).

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:Great news

[artifex2004]

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.

No, you don't. While it may be useful and even practical to develop industry on Luna, I can't think of a real reason to terraform it. Mars, on the other hand, is a much better candidate for terraforming, or at least modifying to create some atmosphere and agriculture sufficient to meet population demands.

Besides, the primary reason to get off the planet is preservation of the species. Terraforming Luna, which due to its proximity would very possibly be catastrophically affected by any major cataclysm of extra-terrestrial origin affecting Earth, really does not meet this goal.

Re:Great news

[bhima]

Here is where we pause and allow to think about the implications of making the moon 6X more massive...

....

....

Done, good we can move to this 'moon' when it rips the earth apart.

Re:Long term environmental impact.

[MindStalker]

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

Good. Now where do you get the hydrogen? Nitrogen?

[human bean]

This is good in at least we won't need to ship the O2, but where are we going to find the other little necessities of life (and most rocket fuel)?

Only "potentially" oxygen?

[Ender_Stonebender]

From the article:

Oosthuizen said sand samples from Namakwa Sands has successfully been used in experiments to produce titanium metal and potentially oxygen.

So they've managed to split the metal out, but don't have the oxygen as straight O2 yet? The article is a bit short on details on this. If so, it's not going to be useful until he figures out how to get O2 (or H2O) through chemical reactions with whatever he's got now.

--Ender

More reasons to build a Moonbase before Mars

[Jtheletter]

I've said before that the US space program should build a permanent moonbase before we attempt to send people on an extended expedition to Mars. It would give us the opportunity to practice for the Mars mission in a simulated Martian environment much closer to any we've created on Earth, with the added benefit that if something goes wrong the crew would be seven days away from help, instead of seven months.

Could this new invention/process be the argument that finally makes people realize the usefulness of such an intermediate step before we race off to the red planet? Besides the ability to produce their own breathable air from lunar rocks for sustained occupancy, the base could double as a fueling station, producing liquid oxygen for the ISS for breathing, fuel, etc. It might even become practical to use such a base as the staging location for the actual Mars mission. It would be much easier to do in-space assembly of a Mars super-ship with a low-gravity (as opposed to the microgravity of orbit) "Factory" available on the moon, shuttling pieces to the ship in lunar orbit.

We've had the technology to setup a permanent presence on the moon for some time, I want to see it happen just for the cool factor, but I think there's plenty of scientific and exploration reasons. Maybe now that the moon can be used to actually produce something we will take advantage of that. Here's hoping.

Cargo only

[wowbagger]

The idea of using the spinner is for cargo only - low energy transfers from lunar surface to LEO.

By using a spinner, you can save the energy from an incoming cargo as rotational kinetic energy in the spinner, rather than pissing it off as heat in an aerobraking maneuver.

You can then use the rotational energy to launch other items back out of Earth's gravity well.

The biggest arguement against using the moon as a base of operations is the delta-V required to get to the lunar surface from earth. But delta-V is only expensive when you have to expend non-reusable reaction mass (and the energy to drive it). When you use skyhooks of various forms (spinnners, beanstocks, etc.) your reaction mass is reusable (the reaction mass is the skyhook), and you can frequently reuse the energy from an incoming cargo - greatly reducing the costs.

True, a manned craft is still expensive as you don't want to follow the slower, lower energy paths - but if you can reduce the mass of the manned craft by shipping nonliving support mass (food and fuel) via slow orbits you can reduce the cost of the manned ship to a managable level.

"Invention"?

[adeyadey]

I would like someone to look at that more closely - there are some well known age-old methods already around for chemically extracting oxygen from oxides & other minerals..

Maybe when we go to the moon, we should leave all the patents on earth!

Re:Long term environmental impact.

[Subjective]

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

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.)