Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
www.eFax.com are spammers
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.
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.
-- I'm not a pessimist, I'm a realist. It's not my fault that life sucks so much. --
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