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One Small Breath For Man
An anonymous reader writes "The New York Times reports on a new technique that may allow Oxygen to be wrung from the soil on the moon. This may pave the way for a moonbase, and allow permanent habitation on Earth's only natural satellite." From the article: "Lunar soil brought back to Earth is in short supply and highly prized, so Nasa researchers have been using matter with the same composition for its tests. The soil contains about 45 per cent oxygen by weight, but it is mostly 'trapped' in the form of silicon dioxide ... At the moment, all oxygen supplies would have to be brought from Earth, which is so expensive and energy-inefficient that it effectively rules out a permanent Moon base. "
I only mod funny =D
Newspapers like the above are supposed to follow AP Style. Said book lays out different rules for different acronyms. IBM has no periods and is all caps for instance. Others may include lower case letters, or may require periods between the letters.
I hated having to remember AP Style.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
SiO2 + energy -> Si + O2
Is perfectly valid chemistry. In fact, if you go back to the hard sci-fi of the 50's and 60's this is the kind of shit they predicted we'd be doing RIGHT NOW. Building plants on the moon to convert lunar dust to oxygen (and high quality silicon for chip fabs) for both lunar bases and space stations.
That modded "informative"? How about "ignorant flamebait"?
The usual UK rule is to preserve caps when you pronounce the letters: (B-B-C) but to use normal case when you pronounce it as syllables. Thus: Nasa, UN, Nato, snafu, UK.
I wasn't aware that the English used here was to be based solely on U.S. rules or else be subject to flaming. I'm American, but I know that the English tend not to use all caps if an acronym is pronounced like any other word, like NASA or NATO. Will you flame them for using "colour" (a mis-spelling!), "lory" (a girl's name?), or "fag" (how dare they be so insensitive and homophobic!) as they often do? Chill, or at least stop thinking you are so clever.
NEWSFLASH: Slashdot attracts a global audience, and people sometimes make grammatical, speling, or syntactical errors. Deal with it.
Also, I'm curious as to how anyone can criticize the English, in general, for not speaking English correctly. I'd find them rather boring if they didn't "talk funny".
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
We continue our inquiry at the wonderful world of Wikipedia. We learn that the Earth's atmosphere is only 21% oxygen, so our 9.765 mL of pure oxygen effectively becomes 46.5 mL of normal air. Our final reference tells us that the average human breath exchanges 450-500 mL of air.
Putting this all together, we get a notably unimpressive result. The "few hours" that it takes to bake oxygen out of moon sand creates only enough oxygen to support one-tenth of one ordinary resting breath for one average-sized adult male.
I really hope I'm off by an order of magnitude or four, but unless I'm terribly wrong (entirely possible), this technology has a long way to go. The final line of the article does give hope, however: "Alternative methods to extract oxygen from Moon soil are also under investigation, including melting the rocks into a liquid and freeing oxygen with an electric current." Obviously NASA realizes this plan still needs work. Hopefully
I only mod funny =D
The standard molar volume of most any gas is still 22.4 L/mol so 8g of Oxygen would be 5.6L of oxygen. Throwing in a ratio of 25% Oxygen, and we end up with over 20L of air.
Still not sure how you got that other figure, but perhaps it refers to the liquid form.
Emmm, check your facts.....
Look up 'combustion'.
We use produce CO2 by burning hydrocarbons which contain these little atoms we call hydrogen. These don't magicly disappear, they end up in water molecules.
So you still need to send up food, but the water will be produced by breathing....
Food + O2 => CO2 + H2O + heat.
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Nuclear energy: Fission. A lot of the weight of an Earth bound nuclear reactor is shielding and safety equipment which is (quite rightly) mandatory. On the moon? "Oh hell, the reactor's melted down. Good thing we sited it 100Km from the base". BTW. We *have* sent nuclear reactors into space - you don't think Voyager is running on car batteries, do you?
The Voyager probes are technically nuclear powered, but it is not the same beast as in a chain reaction fusion reactor. The probes use an RTG which converts some of the heat released from natural radioactive decay into electricity. These do not produce electricty on nearly the same scale as a thermal fission reactor. The RTGs in the Voyager probes are generating about 300 Watts. That couldn't even power some gamers' desktop computers, much less a large scale SiO2 -> Si + O2 manufacturing process. Granted, a large number of RTGs could be used, as well as using larger and more efficient RTGs, but it seems likely to me that the amount of PU-238 (as well as some of the more exotic materials needed to drive the process would be cost prohibitive for any useful amount of oxygen.
All that, and RTGs still need a way to get rid of excess heat, as a thermocouple relies on the difference in temperature to produce electricity. The amount of heat that needs to be removed from a voyager level RTG is not that significant and can probably be accomplished through simple radiation, but the amount needed to drive a major industrial process would require some fairly exotic cooling techniques (although on the lunar night a good portion of the waste heat could be reclaimed to heat living quarters, etc.
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman
Air on earth is ~78% nitrogen by volume (and ~75% by mass), whereas moon base air would be 100% oxygen. There seems to be a couple of problems with this:
1.) At 100% atmospheric oxygen, clothing and hair (and lots of other things I'd guess) become highly flammable, even explosive.
2.) People aren't designed to breathe pure oxygen for extended periods. While it's essential for life, it's also rather toxic - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen#Precautions
So, unless there's another element up there to dilute the oxygen down, you'd still need to take all the nitrogen you need with you.
Sure, if you want to play semantics and have no sense of humor. No need to get technical - it was a joke, and more importantly, a Futurama reference.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
The mass of the earth is 5.97 x 10^24 kg, the mass of the moon is 7.36 x 10 ^22 kg. If a moon base construction involves moving (and I'm being ridiculously, absurdly, beyond-the-capabilities-we-have to-launch liberal here) 20 billion kilos, which is 2 x 10^9, in comparison to the mass of the moon, is still just 1/ 3.5 x 10^13th the total mass, which in words is considerably less than a trillionth the mass of the moon. It probably wouldn't even make a measurable difference in the moons orbit, not to mention the fact that there would probably be some compensatory shift of the earth-moon barycenter, further protecting against much orbital decay