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. "

Comments

Isn't energy enough?

[Bombula]

I am no chemist, but I thought that with enough energy it is usually possible to break up compounds into their constituent elements. Is energy in short supply on the moon? Seems like solar and possibly nuclear energy from the moon's deuterium should be able to supply lots of energy. Am I completely retarded here? Probably...

Re:Isn't energy enough?

[HeX314]

They typically run a couple of years on a full fuel load. Still quite heavy, and no one has ever run one in space.

I had a physics professor who, when explaining the idea behind a Peltier cold plate, stated that one potential use was for the Voyager missions where a small nuclear reactor was placed at the end of a long tower and in the reactor were the two metallic elements sandwiched together which are used in Peltiers, and that the heat caused current flow and thus powered the spacecraft; hence, fission reactors have been used in space.

Re:Isn't energy enough?

[tm2b]

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.

Sadly, it's actually the kind of shit they predicted that we'd be doing 10-20 years ago.

After all, we first made it to the moon 37 years ago... I don't think anybody dreamed that far ahead that we'd abandon it once we achieved it.

new news or old news?

[dotmax]

At the risk of sounding jaded or complacent, this sounds awfully familiar, decades-old familiar... it sounds like the news isn't so much the process as the plan to send real world hardware up for a test run?

the real challenge to my mind sounds like a)keeping the machinery functioning for more than a few days and b) keeping the furnace's optics from collecting too much dust. I wonder how they plan to address the dust-related issues.

all in all, it sounds way cool. Best of luck to everyone involved.

perhaps this is the wrong solution?

[green1]

while it's true that at the moment oxygen has to come from earth to the moon, the same is true for food. it would seem to me that the only viable solution to getting food and oxygen to a base on the moon, isn't to bring it from earth, nor is it to "mine" it from the moon, but rather to build a self sufficient environment, if you are talking about a permanent base on the moon, wouldn't it be prudent to build a base with it's own small eco-system? the right plants, it would seem, could provide both oxygen and food...

Not so hard to bring from Earth

[techno-vampire]

Oxygen isn't as hard to bring from Earth as you might think. Not only do you have to bring air to breath, you have to bring water, both for drinking and for cooling. Once a base is set up, some of that water can be broken down, releasing oxygen. Not only that, the food you carry there also contains oxygen. Part of the base will be a greenhouse, fertilized by waste products and converting CO2 into O2, plus part of the colonist's food supply. If there's too much organic waste, some of it can be incinerated, leaving (mostly) water and CO2, both of which the greenhouse can use. Yes, if we can't get much oxygen out of the regolith, we'll have to ship it up, but that's a one-time expense, not an ongoing one.

Re:Can this article be even more pretentios?

[jcr]

You don't make oxygen out of it, you extract oxygen from it.

Basically, heat it up enough for the Si02 to dissociate, and separate the gasses centrifugally.

-jcr

Re:Can this article be even more pretentios?

[ian_mackereth]

One of the prime differences between doing this on Earth and on the Moon is that vacuum is more plentiful on Luna than it is on Terra.

This lowers the temperature required to disassociate the SiO2, making the engineering sufficiently feasible.

Well, that's what _this_ group says to the funding body within NASA, anyway!

pure oxygen

[penguin-collective]

Contrary to what the article says, pure oxygen is toxic to the lungs, at least at standard pressures. It may be possible to reduce pressure, but I think the long-term effects on humans of breathing pure oxygen at a significantly reduced pressure are still unknown; I wouldn't want to subject myself to it.

Re:Water

[Doctor Faustus]

So you still need to send up food, but the water will be produced by breathing....
The hydrogen still needs to come from somewhere, though. Or were you thinking there'd be enough in the food that's sent up?

Of course, if you *can* get hydrogen somewhere on the moon, you could make water and do greenhouse farming. You could also make your own fuel for return trips.

Mod parent up (Read: I'm flat out wrong)

[mattmacf]

Like I said, I'm no chemist. Obviously, your comment about density clearly shows a glaring flaw in my calculations.

I think the point I should've make clearer is the fact that the energy required to release this (relatively) miniscule amount of oxygen is astronomical (no pun intended). Even assuming that I'm wrong about my interpretation of the article and that a full one fifth of the 100g of the sample becomes oxygen, that we get a total of 20g of O2 or roughly 100L of breatheable air. In order to release this, we need to heat a quantity of 100g of SiO2 to 2500C for several hours. As the article stated, this requires the concentration of sunlight from a 12' wide dish onto a sample of just 100g. I'm not exactly sure how much energy that is (and I'm not about to try and calculate it), but it seems like an awful lot. Hopefully this technique scales incredibly well or the alternate methods of liquifying or electrocuting the sand have more promise. I realize this is fledgling technology were talking about, but it still looks like it has a long way to go.