Moon missions are hot again for the first bit since the space race. While the previous period had us land on the big lunar rock, the missions of tomorrow have us living on it. The initial problem of landing in one piece has been solved, but there are many more puzzles to solve. One major issue of living in the vacuum of space is the lack of breathable air, because, ya know, it’s space.
This brings us to today, where [Blue Origin] has announced a prototype method of turning Moon dust into the valuable gas we call oxygen. [Blue Origin] hasn’t posted much about the actual process behind this feat, terming the system “Air Pioneer”. What we do know is that it requires melting the regolith and then passing current through to release the O2 molecules from their rocky prison.
While some publications on this matter have been calling this a first in its entirety, this isn’t entirely true. NASA has worked on this technology for the past couple of years, called “Gaseous Lunar Oxygen from Regolith Electrolysis”, or (GaLORE). What [Blue Origin] has done, however, is complete the task under a for-profit motive. Perhaps this can introduce the drive needed to accelerate the development of the tech? (If anyone knows any more detail about the Blue Origins system, please let us know.)
Private space is certainly an exciting and quickly moving space in nearly all regards. It’s important to see how far we have come from the initial moon missions. If you want to check out some of the wackier lessons from that era, be sure to read up on the fight for moon cockroaches!
Work on producing oxygen from lunar rock by electrolysis was published in 1969 and 1972 by my father (Dr Michael Oppenheim) using terrestrial basalt as a “a qualitative analog of the lunar rock”. Here’s one of his papers titled “Oxygen from Electrolyzed Lunar Rocks: A Discussion of the Energetics” https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/chapter/bookseries/abs/pii/B9780120373116500107
Nice, thanks! It is essentially just inorganic electrochemistry, the real trick is in doing it at the lowest energy input levels possible and on the moon solar thermal may also be ideal for preheating?
My father’s paper discussed powering the process using solar energy. In his lab he had a small rig for melting basalt. This used an elliptic mirror to reflect the heat from a quartz filament bulb into a crucible containing basalt chips. This generated enough heat to melt the basalt! An ellipse has two focii and I think the bulb is placed at one focus and the basalt at the second. He then passed a current through the basalt. I still have his lab books from the 60s but his melting rig is long gone. I recall he donated it to Manchester University (where he graduated).
I suspect this is rather similar to the FFC Cambridge process which is used to produce titanium from titanium dioxide. This process uses a 900 and 1100 °C pool of molten CaCl2 and a Carbon anode with the titanium dioxide acting as the cathode. causing a calciothermic reduction TiO + Ca → Ti + CaO. The CaO then undergoes an electrolytic reduction back to pure calcium and CO2 is produced at the anode.
I get that they are producing O2 not CO2 but as I said, I suspect their process is SIMILAR.
Have we not played Portal 2 that tells us not to breathe in Moon dust?
The moon will be the ONLY habitable celestial body. We simply cant bring enough food, water or resources from Earth, the fuel costs make this prohibitive. I have to assume a person in low/zero gravity for one way trips would slowly lose quality of health until succumbing. Space is a large coffin
Those with that defeated attitude are doomed to fail. We succeed when we try the impossible.
Okay, lets try saving earth, nature, humanity and so forth first – maybe?!
Instead of wasting Earth’s finite resources on whatever this is (new space race?) and then blasting some of them into space.
But I guess capitalism need a new growth market – now that colonialism, slavery & using 3rd world countries for cheap labor are mostly things of the past…
Okay, enshittification of existing products to keep selling new ones over and over again with less time between every new purchase and the last one is still a “viable” business model. :-/
The truth is:
Earth needs no saving, it will be here long after humans.
Nature needs no saving, it will be here long after humans.
Humanity was lost with the advent of the cellphone.
Capitalism is doing just fine.
Nuf said…
Unless we spend a few hundred years converting Venus’ atmosphere through catalytic bombardment, gravity will always be an obstacle to human habitation of space.
We already know the solution to low/zero gravity, centrifugal gravity simulation. The Stanford Torus was designed in the 1970s. Granted it was designed as an orbital station. A similar structure built under the martian or lunar surface would be our best bet for more grounded colonization attempts.
Designs like the Oneil cylinder could suitable for adaptation as a ship design.
Both of these habitation systems consider food production, and the CO2 to Oxygen cycle key to their success.
Bringing resources from earth certainly isnt the answer.
With recycling systems operating at the level of efficiency attained on the ISS, we could mine enough ice from he lunar poles to support 1.25 million people for 5000 years.
“Unless we spend a few hundred years converting Venus’ atmosphere through catalytic bombardment”
Yeah, the atmosphere. That’s the problem.
Venus is hotter because its atmosphere is roughly 90 times denser than Earth’s, trapping heat efficiently. So Yes. the atmosphere IS the greatest problem.
Key Aspects of Venus Catalytic Bombardment:
The Goal: To reduce the thick CO2 atmosphere (90+ times Earth’s pressure) and create water oceans, turning the planet’s surface from a “hellscape” to a temperate, livable world.
The Process (Bosch Reaction): Hydrogen is introduced to the atmosphere, where it reacts with the carbon dioxide to create water and carbon (graphite).
Catalyst Role: Iron aerosol or other materials (like ground-up lunar dust or processed K-type asteroids) could act as catalysts to speed up these atmospheric chemical reactions.
Sulphur Dioxide Removal: Because Venus is also rich in sulphur dioxide, further bombardment with magnesium or calcium could help sequester it as solid deposits, cleaning the air and reducing pressure.
This approach is considered one of the more realistic theoretical methods for long-term terraforming of Venus, often discussed alongside ideas such as increasing the planet’s rotation rate and constructing a magnetic shield.
With a surface gravity of 38% Mars isnt going to cut it. Venus with~90% of earths gravity is really our only real potential second world though the process of making it habitable will take hundreds if not thousands of years.
The main issue you’ll never counteract is the slow rotation of the planet. So even with 1 atm of pressure with pure 20% O2, you’ll still have one side of the planet that’s a burning hell and the other side that’s cold as space. The worst being that it’s not tidal locked to the sun, so you can’t even live at the terminator, the fire slowly ramps toward the ice and only desolation remains. If you want to live on Venus, you’ll have to accept that the only habitat is in the cloud, at an altitude of 50 to 55km where the pressure is 1 atm and the temperature around 29°C which is where live, as we know it, happens. The good news is that due to winds, you never burn on the sun side or freeze on the night side. No need to terraform here, just to adapt and develop a technology to protect from acid environment. Just like you can’t live on the sea ground on Earth, you can’t live on the ground on Venus.
@sweethack Re Rotation per wikipedia
It has until recently been assumed that the rotation rate or day-night cycle of Venus would have to be increased for successful terraformation to be achieved. More recent research has shown, however, that the current slow rotation rate of Venus is not at all detrimental to the planet’s capability to support an Earth-like climate. Rather, the slow rotation rate would, given an Earth-like atmosphere, enable the formation of thick cloud layers on the side of the planet facing the sun. This in turn would raise planetary albedo and act to cool the global temperature to Earth-like levels, despite the greater proximity to the Sun. According to calculations, maximum temperatures would be just around 35 °C (95 °F), given an Earth-like atmosphere. Speeding up the rotation rate would therefore be both impractical and detrimental to the terraforming effort. A terraformed Venus with the current slow rotation would result in a global climate with “day” and “night” periods each roughly 117 days long, resembling the seasons at higher latitudes on Earth. The “day” would resemble a short summer with a warm, humid climate, a heavy overcast sky and ample rainfall. The “night” would resemble a short, very dark winter with quite cold temperature and snowfall.
Just throw snowballs at it.
Seriously.
House-size snowballs.
And sunshade umbrellas.
From Enceladus.
About one per second.
Set up a factory to mine ice from Enceladus, make great balls of snow. Give each of them a nuclear-powered mass accelerator to give them several km/s to get out of orbit. The mass accelerator detaches and goes back to Enceladus to fetch another snowball. Meanwhile, a solar sail unfurls to take it the rest of the way downhill, bleeding off a few more km/s of Saturn’s orbital velocity and doing course corrections to nail Venus on the sunny side near the equator, at 30 km/s or so. It will take a decade or so to get there.
Shortly before impact, the solar sail will detach, decelerate quickly when unladen, and take up station keeping with its brethren near the L1 point, acting to shade Venus.
The impacting kiloton of water will mostly ablate away, taking a little chunk of the atmosphere with it. That which remains will, in a century or two of bombardment, make a shallow ocean.
The momentum imparted by a kiloton per second hitting Venus at 30 km/s continuously on one side for many decades will also slowly speed up its rotation, and at the same time move it a bit further from the sun.
So you get the atmosphere ablated and thinned out, a bunch water deposited on it to make oceans, a big sunshade to cool it off, the planet spun up to a shorter day, and the place moved to a cooler neighborhood.
In a couple of centuries it might be time to plant lawns.
Gotta think big.
Oh, and while you’re at it, use a few spare solar sails to move a good-size asteroid into close orbit to keep that atmosphere under control in the future.
Uh… what? Did you mean “The Earth will be”? Why in the world do you think the Moon is somehow harder to get to, fuel-wise, than other locations?
Sending resources (not people) to Mars doesn’t actually cost significantly more fuel than sending it to the Moon, and there are actually clever ways to make it even cheaper. Sending people to Mars is harder due to the distance, but resources don’t care about the distance. If you can get out of Earth’s gravity well and close to a Lagrange point (and Earth-Moon Lagrange points are close enough) – you can get anywhere.
Fun fact: one of the weird things with orbital dynamics is that it’s cheaper, in terms of fuel, to get to the surface of Deimos (Mars’s outer moon) than it is to the surface of the Moon. As in, it would take less fuel to send resources to Mars’s moon than our own. It would just take longer.
Your argument would be fine if you were saying we can’t bring enough food, water, or resources to anywhere, but thinking that the Moon is somehow better (in terms of fuel) doesn’t make sense.
Interestingly, the Atlas V and the Falcon 9 are roughly the same mass on the pad. The Atlas V put 1 tonne of Perseverance on Mars’ surface. The Falcon 9 put just a half tonne of Blue Ghost 1 on the Moon.
Sure, it’s not quite a straight-across comparison: That F9 was recovered, so didn’t use all of its lobbing potential on payload mass, but it illustrates that it’s not energetically significantly harder to get to Mars’ surface than the Moon’s, despite the the hundreds of times further distance.
As you alluded, the aerobraking available at Mars helps tilt those odds, and makes up for the big kick you need at this end.
Yup. The main difficulty with deploying resources to Mars isn’t fuel. It’s time, and not exactly “time it takes to get there” but “frequency of transfer windows.” Sure, the delta-V to Mars isn’t that bad, but only if Mars and Earth are aligned right (cue up the Rich Purnell Maneuver). But this isn’t really a fundamental issue – after all, we deploy resources to support research outposts on a yearly basis all the time. It’s just an organizational one.
But then of course Mars is far better equipped to be habitable to some degree than the Moon. I mean, we’ve already made oxygen on Mars!
Don’t worry…we are pushing our luck with all the LEO satellites that are being launched that the Kessler Syndrome is just moments away and we won’t be able to get off this planet.
To be fair the LEO bullets generated by a Kessler Syndrome would mostly de-orbit rapidly by upper atmosphere air drag and gravity. It would be the fragments that shot up to higher orbits that would be the real issue in such a chaotic event.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Space_debris#/media/File%3AOrbital_Debris_Lifetime_Diagram_Low_Eccentricity.png
Funny stuff, that orbital mechanics.
If some fraction of the debris gets “shot up to higher orbits”, what gives it the apogee kick to keep it there, and not just fall right back down?
If debris were parked up in a higher orbit, would it even be an issue any more?
If debris gets shot up to a highly elliptical orbit, what is its residency time in the populated LEO orbits? How much hazard is still present?
I’m certain there are many studies that have looked at this.
The point isn’t that they stay in those higher orbits, it’s that they don’t burn up right away, so they remain in orbit for an extended time.
You’re of course right that it’s been studied, though. (And it’s actually, uh, not good). The key to Kessler not actually happening is that only a tiny fraction of the satellites ever become uncontrolled, and so far that’s been fine.
The huge issue is: what happens if something knocks out our ability to manage that environment, like a big solar storm? That’s when things go to hell: you would likely only have days at this point before chain reactions started happening.
The hard part is going to be nitrogen, which plants also crave.
Mining Martian nitrates, nitrogen-rich ice from Triton, or possibly tapping the atmosphere of Titan. Nitrogen isn’t that rare.