Oxygen Made From Moon Dust For First Time (telegraph.co.uk) 67
"Breathable oxygen has been created from Moon dust," reports the Telegraph, "in a world first that paves the way for a lunar base."
Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin ""announced this week that it had developed a reactor that could successfully release oxygen from lunar soil by using an electric current." Almost half of Moon dust — the thin layer of rock that blankets the lunar surface — is oxygen, but it is bound to metals such as iron and titanium... Previous work to isolate oxygen has been lab-based, and the unwieldy equipment needed has been too difficult to send to the Moon. In contrast, Blue Origin said its small-scale reactor, named Air Pioneer, could be made flight-ready to "provide the first breath of life for a sustainable Moon base"... As well as breathable air, Blue Origin said the reactor produces other critical elements for planetary infrastructure, such as iron, aluminium and silicon for construction and electronics, as well as glass for windows and solar panel covers. The company has previously said it wants to turn the Moon, and eventually Mars, into "self-sustaining worlds where robots and humans can go beyond visiting and truly explore, grow, live, and thrive"....
Blue Origin said it would need to generate around one megawatt of power to drive the reactors — about the energy it would require to power around 400 to 1,000 homes simultaneously. It envisages that each lunar settlement would have an array of nearby solar panels, generating the power needed for one reactor.
Besides breathable air for astronauts, the oxygen could also be used in propellant for refuelling landers and fuel cells, Blue Origin points out — and "produced right where they're needed, and at much lower cost than being brought from Earth."
Thanks to Slashdot reader fjo3 for sharing the article.
Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin ""announced this week that it had developed a reactor that could successfully release oxygen from lunar soil by using an electric current." Almost half of Moon dust — the thin layer of rock that blankets the lunar surface — is oxygen, but it is bound to metals such as iron and titanium... Previous work to isolate oxygen has been lab-based, and the unwieldy equipment needed has been too difficult to send to the Moon. In contrast, Blue Origin said its small-scale reactor, named Air Pioneer, could be made flight-ready to "provide the first breath of life for a sustainable Moon base"... As well as breathable air, Blue Origin said the reactor produces other critical elements for planetary infrastructure, such as iron, aluminium and silicon for construction and electronics, as well as glass for windows and solar panel covers. The company has previously said it wants to turn the Moon, and eventually Mars, into "self-sustaining worlds where robots and humans can go beyond visiting and truly explore, grow, live, and thrive"....
Blue Origin said it would need to generate around one megawatt of power to drive the reactors — about the energy it would require to power around 400 to 1,000 homes simultaneously. It envisages that each lunar settlement would have an array of nearby solar panels, generating the power needed for one reactor.
Besides breathable air for astronauts, the oxygen could also be used in propellant for refuelling landers and fuel cells, Blue Origin points out — and "produced right where they're needed, and at much lower cost than being brought from Earth."
Thanks to Slashdot reader fjo3 for sharing the article.
Re: (Score:2)
If you're talking about for the power source, we have to put the "about one MegaWatt" into context that is missing from the summary and article. That 1 MW may represent a lower bound for the energy they need, but the missing context is how much oxygen that will actually produce. To figure that out, we need a few other bits of information. First is how much oxygen a person needs. For a single human, NASA puts that at an average of .84 kg per day. Second is how much oxygen the process actually produces. For t
Made? (Score:2)
I presume they mean that they extracted oxygen because making oxygen via fusion or fission seems unrealistic.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Made? (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I think his point was that as stated in the headline, they didn't make the oxygen; it was already there. They're just freeing it from its chemical bonds.
Pedantic, I know, but it's true.
Re: Made? (Score:2)
Yes, it is true I didn't make a pot the other day. To be honest, the clay was already there. I just moved it about a bit
Re: Made? (Score:2)
That's just English being ambiguous as usual. They made oxygen (O2). They did not make oxygen (element 8).Everyday language uses the same word for both, though you could be more precise and say they made dioxygen or molecular oxygen.
Re: Made? [Where and at what price?] (Score:2)
Now you have me wondering about this distinction in my second language... I can easily recall the most frequently used word for oxygen (but can't show it to you on Slashdot), but I am unsure how to make the distinction you described. It does seem like the gas and the element are conflated again. (However the same word is used in other ways, especially going into "oxide" territory, so...)
However my actual interest in the topic is tangential. Of course you can get oxygen out of compounds that include oxygen.
Reading is difficult (Score:2)
I presume they mean that they extracted oxygen because making oxygen via fusion or fission seems unrealistic.
What's pretty cool about reading is that you don't have to presume anything. Like, imagine a world where you could've been assed to read just up to the second sentence of the summary where you would've learned "Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin ""announced this week that it had developed a reactor that could successfully release oxygen from lunar soil by using an electric current."
You could've spared us from you proudly proclaiming how lazy you are
Science forgotten (Score:2)
Batteries not included: Please remember, the lunar night lasts 10 Earth days.
Re:Science forgotten (Score:5, Informative)
The produced oxygen and other materials can be stored, therefore there is no need to store the energy in batteries.
There is also a solution to providing continuous solar power without batteries, if the base is near a pole. Put solar panels in a circle around the pole, so that at any given time, some of the panels are in sunshine. I read a paper abstract about this that said the panels should be at 87 degrees latitude (about 100 miles from the pole). I don't know why. It seems feasible.
Re:Science forgotten (Score:5, Informative)
Nuclear battery is a better idea than solar (Score:2)
Works anywhere on the moon regardless of sunlight, maintenance free, lasts a century. The kind of "keep it simple" and "keep it local" sort of thing you want for something critical like breathable air.
Re: (Score:2)
Batteries not included: Please remember, the lunar night lasts 10 Earth days.
You're right. It's a pity that oxygen needs to be used immediately and can't be stored.
Re: (Score:2)
Batteries not included: Please remember, the lunar night lasts 10 Earth days.
Part of the interest in a lunar south pole location for the base is one could put the panels on a ridge which sees the sun the whole time. Of course, then they'd have to be rotating, more things to go wrong: but even just some spifft rotating ones would help a lot with the night-time problem.
This is more exciting that circling the mooon (Score:2)
The lunar base feels a little closer, although Im sure the process needs a lot of refinement and how to get sustained power up there will be interesting.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Sorry to say, but this seems more exciting than our recent circle of the moon.
True but the circling of a human crew is a bit more exciting than the occasional camera of the last 50 years. Its progress. :-)
Without a vehicle to get people to the moon, we don't need to extract O2. I guess you could argue we need to do the electrolysis anyway to extract metals for robotic manufacturing.
Re: (Score:2)
The flyby of the moon is good from a marketing standpoint, a "see? we still can send people there, it's not lost ancient tech", it will help people convince investors to well invest in this.
But turning one of the worst plagues for anyone actually landing on the moon into something very useful is great
Re: (Score:2)
The lunar base feels a little closer, although Im sure the process needs a lot of refinement and how to get sustained power up there will be interesting.
That raises the important question of what degree you need sustained electrical power for. If you need it for industrial processes, sure. For life support? Not so much. Or, at least, not so much compared to the average electric power requirement. To keep astronauts alive, you need electric power for things like atmospheric conditioning, heat, etc. That can take potentially tens of kiloWatts per astronaut. However, a lot of that is for things that can be made in batches that will last the two weeks of lunar
More info would be nice (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Given that the article indicates that the 'reactor' can produce most of the raw ingredients for a solar panel, perhaps they could be made on the moon, once the reactor was started?
Obviously this would take quite some time - but it'd be cheaper than lifting solar panels out of Earth's gravity well - instead you'd lift up the electronics needed to control them?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
If you need a MegaWatt just to run the process though, you have a sort of reverse catch-22 if you want to use this to expand a small base quickly. You pretty much have to start with large base power infrastructure just to run the process. Although, you probably don't need a continuous 1 MW, just for long enough to run 1 batch, but it's not clear how long that would be, and capacitors have a weight cost as well. Basically, any bootstrapping done with this process sounds like it's going to need a fairly large
Re: (Score:2)
From what I can find, it would actually be more along the lines of 1.6 kg per hour. In terms of life support, that would supply a number of astronauts in the mid forties. That is, of course, only if this process is somehow the only method you have for supplying oxygen to the astronauts rather than re-using what is in the habitat through, for example plants, or a CO2 cracking process. So, this really should only be needed for replacing lost oxygen, or for expansion of the habitat volume beyond what was shipp
Re: (Score:2)
The details I could find suggest about 39 kilograms of oxygen per day, or about enough for 47 astronauts (though you would want a safety margin, so probably no more than 40).
Perhaps not as important as it might sound (Score:2)
While there's probably good use cases for this (I'd imagine particularly if you are able to actually utilize your "waste" metals produced by this), the allusion to "breathable" oxygen implies this could perhaps solve the issue of securing breathable air for your would be lunar station denizens.
But people don't destroy oxygen, we convert it into CO2, and CO2 is energetically cheaper to electro-chemically break down back to carbon and oxygen, and perhaps even more importantly, if we're talking a permanent moo
Re: (Score:2)
I believe the purpose is also for rocket fuel. Which would require much more oxygen than a moderately sized moon base. And the process generates metals, which can be used to make more rockets.
he did nto invent anything its been done for 180 y (Score:1)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
It is a well know process there is nothing new. You learn how to do your secend week in metallurgy class.
Re: (Score:2)
Breathable oxygen != breathable air (Score:2)
Air on Earth is about 80% nitrogen. Guess how much nitrogen the moon has? None. Or so close to none that it's practically the same. Breathing pure oxygen is really not a good idea.
This is still useful and it will be a help for doing lots of things on the moon. But don't think it means you can produce breathable air on the moon.
Re: (Score:2)
We don't need the Nitrogen to breathe. Obviously we could just go with a lower pressure pure O2, but this is a fire risk (see Apollo 1)
Deep sea divers breathe a Helium/Oxygen mixture, and there has been some talk of mining for Helium-3 in the lunar polar regions.
Re: (Score:3)
Imagine living on the actual moon and yet being unable to share a single voice call or a recording of your voice without earth humans viciously mocking you for your helium induced falsetto.
Re: (Score:3)
Nobody is proposing to add helium to the atmosphere in a lunar base. This is done in deep-sea exploration because they need a high pressure atmosphere, and they can't use nitrogen because it is narcotic at high pressure (not to mention the need for decompression to avoid risk of the bends when ascending).
Lower pressure does not change your vocal timber.
Re: (Score:2)
Nitrogen or helium? (Score:2)
Helium and Neon are available in the lunar regolith. So substituting them for Nitrogen is a practical solution if necessary.
Why would you do that? If you're harvesting the trivial fraction of a percentage of volatiles from lunar regolith, nitrogen is also available in lunar regolith, so just use that.
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citation... [nasa.gov]
Re: (Score:2)
Helium and Neon are available in the lunar regolith. So substituting them for Nitrogen is a practical solution if necessary.
Why would you do that? If you're harvesting the trivial fraction of a percentage of volatiles from lunar regolith, nitrogen is also available in lunar regolith, so just use that. https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citation... [nasa.gov]
OK, I didn't think Nitrogen was on the list.
Re: (Score:2)
Lunar rocks brought back to Earth have so little nitrogen [sciencedirect.com], it's hard to even measure the exact amount. The highest amount found in any sample is 1.4-2.1 ppm, and most samples have much less.
You're much better off just shipping some nitrogen from Earth (costing around $1.2 million per kg [discovermagz.blog]). That could work for a small settlement. If you want a large, self-sustaining civilization, neither approach is realistic.
Re: (Score:2)
Lunar rocks don't have any helium, either.
The helium (and the nitrogen) is in the regolith.
Re: (Score:1)
There is not enough he3 on the moon in any one spot to fill a lung its pipe dream.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The amount of helium-3 on the moon is about 100x less than the amount of nitrogen (1.4 to 15 ppb [wikipedia.org]). People talk about mining it because it's so rare on Earth. Even a tiny amount is still worth a lot. You don't use it just as an inert gas to substitute for nitrogen.
Re: (Score:2)
As another poster pointed out, they're not talking about helium-3, just regular old, second most common element in the universe, helium. By mass it's available in the regolith at about the same abundance as nitrogen by baking it. Of course, by volume at 1 atm of pressure, it's available in much more abundance than nitrogen from the regolith. The fact that it will leak out like crazy and cause communications issues. As observed, you would be squeakier, but also it's harder for sound to transfer to the eardru
Re: Breathable oxygen != breathable air (Score:2)
You clearly need to learn a little about gas dynamics. It's all about partial pressure.
Air is about 20% oxygen. So humans need about 20% oxygen at one atmosphere to function well under most exertion levels. You can do with less, but let's ignore that for now.
If you reduced the habitat pressure to 1/5 ATM then you could easily survive in pure oxygen. In fact, if you were building a long term habitat you'd want the lowest internal pressure which is survivable to reduce the stresses on its hull. So 1/5 atmosph
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Helium would have most of the same problems as pure oxygen. In a nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere the nitrogen is a heat sink and the density of the air slows down convection. In a helium/oxygen atmosphere, even at full pressure, the helium is barely a heat sink at all, and the air density is barely above just the oxygen alone, so convection is barely slowed. Ultimately, nitrogen is the best choice, and throw in all the argon you can get your hands on.
Re: (Score:2)
If you reduced the habitat pressure to 1/5 ATM then you could easily survive in pure oxygen. In fact, if you were building a long term habitat you'd want the lowest internal pressure which is survivable to reduce the stresses on its hull. So 1/5 atmospheres seems sensible.
It is survivable from the perspective of getting enough oxygen. In fact, breathing would be even easier because the air would be less dense. However, there are a series of other problems that would make it suboptimal. Dehydration is a major one. Then there are various pressure related issues including lung problems. Long term, it's not very good for human health, and it's not comfortable. There's also the increased flammability. While the partial pressure of the oxygen is the same, the nitrogen in the atmos
Breathable air doesn't necessarily have nitrogen (Score:2)
Breathing pure oxygen is really not a good idea.
Nitrogen can be replaced with other inert gases. For example helium and neon which are both in lunar regolith.
And spacecraft, and possibly a colony, could operate at a lower pressure. Still need to mix the O2 with something due to fire hazard.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I agree, and also, let's add a little N2O. Just for the lulz.
Maybe. With the fire hazard removed a still might be simpler. :-)
Re: (Score:2)
So astronauts will be constantly high on an overdose of oxygen?
Re: Breathable oxygen != breathable air (Score:2)
Much of what air is composed (N especially, but lots of other stuff too) is non reactive to human biology. You don't need to replenish it because breath it out.
Oxygen gets bonded to carbon, and presumably we'll use that for growing crops, so we need to be able to replenish that somehow. Pretty much everything else is only present in trace amounts and wouldn't be prohibitive to ship from Earth, or it isn't consumed by animal biology.
Re: (Score:2)
So astronauts will be constantly high on an overdose of oxygen?
Not if the oxygen partial pressure is the same. However, if the atmosphere is just oxygen at about 3 psi, they will have to deal with dehydration (as is common on jet flights, but worse) and pressure related issues that are not conducive to long-term good health.
Re: (Score:2)
Air on Earth is about 80% nitrogen. Guess how much nitrogen the moon has? None.
It's available from regolith, though at a high extraction cost. I've written a number of posts on this subject elsewhere in this thread, but if you need nitrogen on the moon, there's plenty available at the poles in the form of ammonia. It's right there with all the ice.
Air for how many people? (Score:2)
That's a LOT of power. How many people does that support? One? A team of four? A small community?
If this is per person, this would be prohibitively expensive and intensely damaging to the lunar surface if we try to establish an actual colony.
Re: (Score:2)
From what I could find, it would work out to about 47 or 40 with a reasonable safety margin (and because it's a nice round number, though now I realize I should have gone with 42 because it's what you get when you multiply six by nine and also how many roads a man must walk down). Of course, that would only be if you were sourcing all of their oxygen through this system without any recycling (like with plants, or some catalytic electrolysis process to break down CO2). If it's supplemental, to replace losses
Drill, Baby, Drill (Score:1)
I can't wait for Michael Bay to make a movie out of this.
Proof (Score:2)
So someone did a proof of concept on something that was obvious and actually quite trivial. So we have that now.