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

Looky here city girl...

[Anonymous Coward]

Oxygen don't grow on trees.

Water

[MichaelSmith]

I predict that if hydrogen can be extracted from regolith close to the surface, then a lot of that oxygen will be burnt down to make water. During the apollo missions oxygen had to be carried but more often than not water for cooling was the limiting factor for stays on the surface.

Its nice to see that people are working directly on this, even if it will be at least 15 years before anybody walks on the moon again.

Re:Water

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

I predict that if hydrogen can be extracted from regolith close to the surface, then a lot of that oxygen will be burnt down to make water.

I predict that if anything can be extracted from the regolith close to the surface, it will run out so fast that after a few weeks, expensive subsurface mining and/or far flung harvesting will be made necessary, thus defeating the point of the entire excercise.

I don't know about you, but I think ore harvesters on the moon is simply not a feasable option. They cost $1400 a pop after the first!

Re:Water

[pe1rxq]

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.

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.

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?

[Cadallin]

No, you're exactly right. Much of the lunar dust is Si02, the same as sand or glass or quartz.

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.

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.

Re:Isn't energy enough?

[Cicero382]

I think this should be modded up.

One of my mentors at school (an amazingly talented man) pointed out to me that with enough energy, there is virtually nothing you can't do if you can can apply the energy the way you want. Efficiency doesn't matter if you have enough.

On the moon, it's a matter of taking the differences in environment (from Earth) and turning them to your advantage. So, for example:

Solar energy: No problem - no atmosphere, no clouds etc.

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?

Nuclear Energy: Fusion. A tricky one, but are we "decades" away? Probably not - a lot of effort is going into this one. And, didn't I hear that the moon has significant traces of He3? Or have I been reading too much Ben Bova?

Cooling: No problem. Do you know how *cold* it is in the shadows on the moon?

etc etc.

Re:Isn't energy enough?

[shawb]

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.

Another addiction

[Anonymous Coward]

Picture it. Fights between "our reserves are finishing soon" versus "it's going to last for long".
Campaigns on the line of "Have children, they'll only take n cubic metres of soil per year".
New religions venerating resurrection via burial: "Oxygen you are and in oxygen you'll become".
Mr President Of The Moon declaring "We as a nation have an addiction to oxygen".

Re:Another addiction

[Anonymous Coward]

Islamic nations happen to land on the highest deposits of oxygen. And then the Americans go in to "liberate" them. And just coincidentally steal their oxygen deposits...

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.

Re:Can this article be even more pretentios?

[mattmacf]

Read TFA:

To extract oxygen from lunar soil, scientists used a lens-like structure to focus sunlight on to it, heating it to 2,500C.

In Nasa's latest tests, a 12ft-wide dish was used to concentrate the sun's rays on to 100g of a substance similar to Moon soil. After a few hours, one fifth of the substance had turned into oxygen.

Now tell me, how hard was that?

Dammit!

[Arivia]

The article title made me think /. had finally opened its' much-awaited Corsetry section...

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...

Re:perhaps this is the wrong solution?

[miro f]

don't know if you noticed, but we produce carbon dioxide. I have an experiment for you to try:

breathe out

there you go... carbon dioxide.

Obviously some would have to be brought from Earth. And obviously, some would leak and need to be replaced. A self-sustainable eco-system is likely impossible, but it would reduce the oxygen requirements

Re:perhaps this is the wrong solution?

[bobscealy]

I propose a subtle change to your experiment:
1) Take one human.
2) Place human in oxygen free environment.
3) Wait 10 minutes, and measure rate of carbon dioxide production.
(... 4) Profit? ...)
The OP seemed to be suggesting that merely having plants would solve the problem. Plants generating oxygen and humans in turn generating carbon dioxide is all well and good, but you cant avoid the fact that neither gas just happens to be lying about the place on the moon. To start this nice ecosystem some quantity of either gas must either be transported there or produced there.

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:Not so hard to bring from Earth

[1u3hr]

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

TFA doesn't go into it, but the major use of a lunar oxygen plant would be as fuel, rather than breathing. For return trips to earth, or hopefully to orbit, asteroids, Mars.... Of course, they'd also need hydrogen, but even if that can't be found easily on the Moon, it's a lot lighter than oxygen to haul up.

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:Please pay attention

[MichaelSmith]

NASA is an acronym not a proper name. All letters in NASA must be upper case

How about laser (Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation)

Silicon Dioxide

[Inda]

Fact: Silicon dioxide is also known as silica.

Fact: Inhaling crystalline silica dust can lead to silicosis or cancer.

I thought they were amusing facts. +1 Important please Mods. :)

Re:Please pay attention

[Enderandrew]

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.

Re:Please pay attention

[1u3hr]

Only the English are inconsistent with their acronyms where they capitalize BBC but not NASA. So much for the cradle of their namesake language.

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.

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!

Re:Can this article be even more pretentios?

[iron-kurton]

Excuse me, sand contains Silicon Dioxide, or SiO2. Breathable Oxygen is O2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sand

Re:Please pay attention

[uvajed_ekil]

Only the English are inconsistent with their acronyms where they capitalize BBC but not NASA. So much for the cradle of their namesake language.

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".

Re:Can this article be even more pretentios?

[cruachan]

2 days ago...

Science Ability Down in U.S. High Schools
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/05/2 7/1639243

How true.

Still not terribly efficient...

[mattmacf]

I'm no chemist either but I did take a high school chem class a few years ago. I'm far from confident in my calculations, so feel free to correct me if I'm egregiously wrong, but AFAICT the amount of energy needed might be a limiting factor. Now, the article gives us two tidbits of information.

In Nasa's latest tests, a 12ft-wide dish was used to concentrate the sun's rays on to 100g of a substance similar to Moon soil. After a few hours, one fifth of the substance had turned into oxygen.

and

The soil contains about 45 per cent oxygen by weight, but it is mostly 'trapped' in the form of silcon dioxide.

Now assuming that one fifth of the 45% of the oxygen in the soil is 100% oxygen, we yield a total of 9g of pure oxygen. A quick trip to Google tells us that oxygen has a molecular weight of (roughly) 16. Therefore, 9g of oxygen translates to 0.5625 moles of pure oxygen. Another check of Google tells us that the volume of oxygen at STP is 17.36 x 10^-6 cubic meters/mole. We finish our Google-sponsored portion of this post by converting to give us 17.36 mL/mol. Multiplying by our previous result (0.5625*17.36) gives us a whopping 9.765 milliliters of oxygen. So how much exactly is that?

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

Ramen is Carcinogenic

[Derosian]

I was looking at a Ramen ingrediants list while reading this, and I found out that the Soup Base has Silicon Dioxide in it... Does this mean Ramen is carcinogenic? And better yet.... Does this mean we can make Oxygen from Ramen if the need arises?

Not Quite

[FasterthanaWatch]

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.

Re:Not Quite

[DeepStream]

I am a chemist, and the number you have for the molar volume is quite simply wrong (at least at STP). O2 behaves reasonably close to an ideal gas, and does in fact have a molar volume around 24L at STP.

If you think carefully about the numbers you got:
9g to 9.7 mL gives you a density of ~1 g/mL, which is that of water, not that of any gas at atmospheric T/P.

As a previous poster mentioned, you're much closer to getting 50L of breathable air (at 25% O2). While not a very large amount (1 cubic meter is 1000 L), 100g of rock isn't a whole lot either.

The simple fact is that SiO2 is about 50% oxygen by mass, and you can get a LOT more moon rock than you can either liquid O2 or water.

Re:Not Quite

[oringo]

Grandparent's calculation also failed to point out that human respiration does not consume 100% of the oxygen in the air. Dry air contains about 20% oxygen, and exhaled (consumed) air contains about 16% oxygen. To make the air breathable again, you only need to replace the 4% consumption. Assuming that you can remove the CO2 in a reasonable speed, the 20L of breathable air (flow) can easily be turned to 100L of breathable air (flow).

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:Can this article be even more pretentios?

[ComaVN]

People, people, you got it all wrong.

The reaction is: Earth+Fire=Air.

Don't they teach proper alchemy anymore?

Re:Moon landings are so 70's

[AfricanImpi]

For the last time, returning to the moon is not just "a sci-fi wet dream", it is a necessary and useful step on the way to our exploration and colonisation of other planets.

Currently, when building spacecraft, everything has to be constructed either completely or mostly on earth. We thus expend a massive amount of energy to get these things past the earth's gravity and into space. It's a waste of energy and severely limiting.

With a moonbase, we would be able to build spacecraft in an environment with far less gravity, meaning that not only would we have much greater freedom in our designs, but it would be cheaper and would require less energy for launch, which would translate into much more available energy for a trip to Mars and a subsequent orbit and return.

So when we get to the moon for the first time...

[Somatic]

we can test that.

soil?

[SilentGhost]

It's not a soil. It's ground. Calling it soil implies idea that there are some living organisms there. which is incorrect.

Stripmining the moon.

[Sqreater]

Fine, let's stripmine the moon for oxygen and small amounts of water using equipment transported from Earth at immense expense just to prove we can place a few gravity-maimed individuals on a Moon base or "colony" there.

The moon is a desert. It it a desert like no desert on the face of the Earth. We know that. Let's not engage in senseless activities just because we can. Let's not rape the public purse to satisfy bored scientists or political ego.

Re:Please pay attention

[Cicero382]

" I'd find them rather boring if they didn't "talk funny"."

Hmm.. Thank you - I think.

I'm English and I speak with so-called "received pronunciation" - essentially no regional accent. (No, not like the Queen) and this reminds me of a conversation I had with an American friend. It went something like this:

F: "...AND you talk funny"

Me: "Oh, really? What language are we speaking at the moment?"

F: "English!"

Me: "And what nationality am I?"

F: (Seeing the trap) "Err.. English."

Me: "So, who is the one talking funny?"

F: "F*ck off!"

Re:now that is brilliant

[Julian Morrison]

Mining, interplanetary and asteroid-mining rocket bases, drop-off point for stuff intended for trans-shipment to earth, solar collection for energy, vacuum and low-G manufacturing, comms, dangerous science, nuclear power plants and intensive farming. Those are just off the top of my head.

The Moon, for one...

[justthisdude]

welcomes it's new oxygen-breathing overlords.

What about the nitrogen?

[jmh55]

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.

Re:The grammar zealot is here.

[kimvette]

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.

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.

Re:If the mass changes

[tpjunkie]

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

Re:now that is brilliant

[ErikZ]

Why settle America? What's the point? I'm sure there are some things you can do there that you can't do in Europe, but they aren't *really* important.

Socialists hate it when people want to leave.

One small step for man.

[SavvyPlayer]

One giant gasp for mankind.

Re:So when we get to the moon for the first time..

[iminplaya]

Build a dome!? Haven't you ever seen Goldfinger?