from the I-thought-it-was-all-green-cheese dept.
Space scientists have been intrigued for years with the possibility of finding usable oxygen on the moon — not in the lunar atmosphere, since there essentially is none, but in the rocks. As long ago as 1962 ... [NASA researchers] predicted vast lunar processing plants turning out 4,000 pounds of liquid oxygen per month, both for breathing and as an oxidizer for rocket fuel.... Now the Surveyor 5 spacecraft ... reveals it is standing directly over just the kind of rock that would do the job. — Science News, October 14, 1967
Update
The moon is not yet dotted with lunar oxygen factories, but scientists are still devising ways to pull oxygen from moon rocks. One technique, proposed by NASA scientists in 2010, isolates oxygen by heating lunar rocks to over 1650° Celsius and exposing them to methane. Chemical reactions would produce carbon monoxide and hydrogen, which then react to create water. Passing an electric current through the water would separate oxygen from hydrogen, allowing the desired gas to be captured.
Is this just pie in the sky? Cheese? Or is this a viable concept?
Read on ScienceNews.org
(Score: 2) by bradley13 on Monday October 09 2017, @12:38PM (2 children)
Pie in the sky? No, it's more general: it's resources in the sky.
50 years ago. 1960s technology. And today we're still stuck on this rock, when there are thousands of times - millions of times - more resources floating around for the taking. It makes no sense that we aren't racing to get out there.
The first step - building the initial infrastructure - is a big one. Fuel production is the most critical (and why a reactionless drive would be a boon).But once you have an infrastructure outside the Earth's gravity well, actual production will be relatively easy. The resources are there for the taking.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Gaaark on Monday October 09 2017, @03:56PM
Which is one reason i'd like to see a moon base before going all the feck to Mars: set up a base, iron out all the wrinkles. Start mining. Set up a rocket base with which to launch vehicles for mining asteroids.
Use that low gravity base to go to Mars.
Instead, we're sending shit to Mars so people can die because someone went "Shit: didn't even think of that!" that could have been worked out in a moon base (that would have a much higher survival rate due to distance).
I'll go to the moon (i want to live on a moon base so i can 'moon' the earth, lol) and maybe die: i WON'T go to Mars to absolutely die.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday October 09 2017, @05:45PM
Where's the money in it? Elon Musk is only able to do as much as he has, because he's figured out that much. No matter what we do, living on Mars, the Moon, any "nearby" place will be infinitely harder than it is on Earth. Many of our "worst case scenarios" may be easier to survive on Earth than it would be to eek out an existence on Mars, the Moon, or some tin-can in space. Space is hard; isn't a meme.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 09 2017, @01:06PM
In the intervening 50 years, water ice has been discovered at the bottoms of the Moon's polar craters. Also, ion thrusters have been coming into use. They can use various elements as the propellant.
Metal oxides are plentiful on the Moon. Besides the process mentioned, others may be practical. [nasa.gov] Apart from the water ice I mentioned, minerals containing hydrogen and carbon are scarce, so if material is to be brought from Earth, methane is not a bad choice.
(Score: 3, Informative) by KritonK on Monday October 09 2017, @01:28PM (2 children)
Where would the methane come from? Is there a source on the Moon? If not, then we'll have to bring it from Earth, in which case we might as well bring oxygen instead, and save ourselves the trouble of producing it from regolith. Oxygen and methane have approximately the same molecular weight, with oxygen being marginally lighter, so there would be nothing to be gained by transporting methane to the Moon instead of oxygen. Besides, methane is not exactly abundant here on Earth. (Que in the jokes about its main source on Earth.)
On the other hand, if, in addition to hydrogen, the other by-product of this process is carbon, then perhaps the two can be recombined into methane, so that a small amount of methane may go a long way. A brief search, however, showed that this is not how methane is produced industrially (you need CO₂ for that) and, if you heat carbon and hydrogen, you get acetylene, not methane.
(Score: 3, Informative) by ledow on Monday October 09 2017, @05:16PM (1 child)
Seems about right. (Oh, and it's "cue", by the way)
All these fancy ideas seem to rely far too much on complicated technologies. Water ice would be pretty easy to find, but nowhere near where you'd want to live I think. And everything else is playing about.
What you'd need is not something that relies on bubbling methane through rocks and doing chemical reactions on things like methane and oxygen (just sounds like a disaster waiting to happen to me), but something simple, that you can build up, expand, run for a long time, and not rely on too much stuff just happening to be where you want it to be.
Even electroysis of water sounds painfully slow, quite dangerous (big tanks of hydrogen and oxygen in close proximity), but it's an amazingly simple reaction that you could do with just water and electricity - that's why they do that on the ISS, for example.
Rocks, to me, don't shout "easy source of oxygen" compared to water. You need to find water anyway, a resource you can use directly for consumption, and one that you can then trickle-produce fuel and breathable air from? Seems a no-brainer compared to all the complications of shipping/obtaining methane and going through this palaver.
To be honest, you're using the rocks to make water anyway. It would be quicker to just find a source of water and cut out the middle man. You're going to consume a lot more water than oxygen once you start having crew, plants, etc. anyway. I'd rather find a direct source than have to rely on a methane shipment coming in and months of reactions to make it produce enough. And then no carbon monoxide to deal with, either, which just sounds like an accident waiting to happen when there's a leak.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Monday October 09 2017, @09:01PM
The best way to make oxygen on the moon is much, much simpler. Plant ye seeds.
They'll be needing some water.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by Arik on Monday October 09 2017, @08:59PM (2 children)
What strikes me about this sort of process is what an incredibly large amount of energy would be consumed in order to do it. This would be an incredibly expensive way to make oxygen, and the hype seems to be based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the problem. The problem isn't that we don't have a way to get oxygen to the moon - we do. We can bottle it up and stick it on a rocket. Old tech, understood, no reason it won't work.
It's just expensive. Incredibly expensive. And fundamentally the reason it's so expensive is because so much energy is required to do it.
So, just having a way to get oxygen on the moon, that doesn't solve the problem at all. What you need is a relatively inexpensive way to get oxygen on the moon. To do what's described in TFA you would still need rockets, and lots of them. To send everything else involved in the process up. One way or another that includes a way to generate all the power this process will pull. You're talking about homogenizing tons and tons of rocks, isolating them in methane, "cooking" them at temperatures more appropriate for a smelter than a stove for long periods of time, just to get ready to condense the water. And you STILL have even MORE energy involved then in separating the water back out, and a lot of it.
Just a hunch but it might well be a lot less expensive just to ship the oxygen itself, instead of all the machines and fuel and methane etc. required for this operation.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Monday October 09 2017, @10:05PM (1 child)
I agree, to a large degree.
But I can't help inferring a little deeper level of assumptions in TFA's statements about the Moon having oxygen: Moon base, research, non-transient human presence. (Colonization, lunar independence, political relations and trade, admittedly nutty far-off stuff.)
On Earth every green plant from the tiniest algae to the majestic California Redwood is busy scrubbing carbon dioxide and manufacturing oxygen, providing that cheap Terran supply that we start with, while on the Moon, any oxygen is buried deep in the (Rocks|Ice|Whatever).
Looking at it from a perspective from a Lunie living on the Moon, sure, it's expensive and energy-consuming to cook out the oxygen vs. buying it from Earth, even considering transportation costs.
But we have made great strides in solar cells and can harvest solar energy more cheaply than ever before, and the Moon gets better sunlight than the Earth (I have seen 27% brighter quoted as a figure in Popular Science [popsci.com]) because it's not filtered through atmosphere.
At some point, maybe from economies of scale, or from better and better energy technology, perhaps it becomes cheaper and less trouble for the Lunie to mine his own oxygen?
(Score: 2) by Arik on Monday October 09 2017, @11:51PM
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?