Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[zchris13]

Not done with flippin Luna, bro.

The Moon

On the moon, the lunar highland material anorthite is similar to the earth mineral bauxite, which is an aluminium ore. Smelters can produce pure aluminum, calcium metal, oxygen and silica glass from anorthite. Raw anorthite is also good for making fiberglass and other glass and ceramic products.

Over twenty different methods have been proposed for oxygen extraction on the moon. Oxygen is often found in iron rich lunar minerals and glasses as iron oxide. The oxygen can be extracted by heating the material to temperatures above 900 °C and exposing it to hydrogen gas. The basic equation is: FeO + H2 → Fe + H2O. This process has recently been made much more practical by the discovery of significant amounts of hydrogen-containing regolith near the moon's poles by the Clementine spacecraft.

It has also been proposed to use lunar regolith as a general construction material, through processing techniques such as sintering, hot-pressing, liquification, and the cast basalt method. The cast basalt method is used on Earth for construction of, for example, pipes where a high resistance to abrasion is required. Cast basalt has a very high hardness of 8 Mohs (diamond is 10 Mohs) but is also susceptible to mechanical impact and thermal shock which could be a problem on the moon.

Glass and glass fibre are straightforward to process on the moon and Mars, and it has been argued that the glass is optically superior to that made on the Earth because it can be made anhydrous.[6] Successful tests have been performed on earth using two lunar regolith simulants MLS-1 and MLS-2.

In August 2005, NASA contracted for the production of 16 metric tons of simulated lunar soil, or "Lunar Regolith Simulant Material." This material, called JSC-1a, is now commercially available for research on how lunar soil could be utilized in-situ.

According to this, and what I know, I think if you brought a "starter pack" of energy, you could start producing just about anything you wanted fairly shortly.

[qwertyuiopas]

Chemical separation would likely only be truely viable when it uses catalysts, but if any chemical was consumed by the separation process, it wouldn't work very well, and it would probably be better to use mechanical methods.

[zchris13]

With enough energy, you can do alot of stupid things with chemicals.

[The Architect]

Using physical force (centrifuges, etc) and heat was suggested to avoid chemical the need for chemical catalysts.

[zchris13]

Also, in a vacuum, you can make things STUPIDLY hot, because they can only radiate heat.