If anyone is interested in other resources and information on this topic, here are a few links.

NASA page on In-Situ Resource Utilization: https://www.nasa.gov/isru

NASA Swamp Works: https://technology-ksc.ndc.nasa.gov/featurestory/swampworks

Dr. Phil Metzger, who worked for a long time at Swamp Works before taking a research position at a university. Still very much involved in processing regolith and moon bases. https://twitter.com/DrPhiltill

NASA also hosts an annual competition around regolith collection called the NASA Lunabotics Competition. The last 2 years have been a little rough, with a cancellation due to government furloughs, then a cancellation due to the pandemic. Swamp Works engineers, technicians, and machinists attend and are often judges. Where they might make 1 or 2 prototypes per year, they're able to see 30-50 different designs and see their performance. The rules are setup to penalize activity similar to the incentives NASA has. Low bandwidth usage, high material collection, and low vehicle weight are all rewarded. https://www.nasa.gov/offices/education/centers/kennedy/techn...

Alabama has had a very good run, accomplishing fully autonomous 10 minute competition runs, avoiding rocks, having a really great systems engineering approach.

There has also been a competition in Hawaii on Mauna Kea periodically. I was at Iowa State in 2014 when we attended. There's an area just west of the visitor center with an environment very similar to the moon. Teams tele-operated the robots from ~30 miles away in Hilo, introducing a time lag in communications. It was a really incredible experience, and a lot of logistical planning to ship a robot, spare parts, and tool to Hawaii. Dremels are never the right tool for the job...but a lot of jobs can be done with a Dremel. Here's a video from Alabama at the same site in 2012. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqWpglIwOr4

It's an old well-known proposal to electrolyze molten oxides, isn't it? There is even hope for wide industrial applications on Earth of such technology for coal-free metal production. Though I don't see a particular novelty here and it will be quite hard to pull-off on a moon base (after all, you have to work with high-temperatures and the process is quite power hungry), I am happy to see that work continues in this field.

I don‘t quite understand why we think humans can survive staying on moon bases or trips to Mars before the problem of cosmic radiation is solved. Going on a trip to Mars and back makes you prone to dying from cancer. Mars doesn‘t have a magnetic field that would shield inhabitants from being bombarded by high-energy particles. How are we going to deal with this?

This seems relatively unexciting; we've known that the moon has abundant oxygen for decades. The hard part is finding stuff (food, hydrogen, hydrocarbons, etc.) to burn with it.

We should enjoy the view we have of The Moon, before the whole thing becomes a damned strip mine.

Industrial processes are just so power-hungry. We're a long way from mining, smelting etc in space. So many problems to solve, not the least of which is projecting power-generating equipment in the megawatt range into space.

I mean if you have enough energy, you can do anything starting with just rocks. And, there is energy in space. It’s just expensive.

Shit, this is what my HN app shows as the article preview:

> British engineers are fine-tuning a process that will be used to extract oxygen from lunar dust, leaving behind metal powders that could be 3D printed into cons

This is interesting. How much moon dust do we have that we are conducting these kind of experiments?

>"Lunar regolith, the thin layer of dusty rock that blankets the Moon, is not so different from the minerals found on Earth. By weight, it contains about 45 percent oxygen which is bound to metals such as iron and titanium, making it unavailable."

>"The electrochemical process takes place in a specially designed chamber - the ones used for research are about the size of a washing machine. Oxygen-containing material is submerged in molten salt, heated to 950 degrees Celsius. A current is then passed through it, which triggers the oxygen to be extracted and migrate across the liquid salt to collect at an electrode, leaving behind a mixture of metal powders."

PDS: Some posters have suggested that the electrification of molten salts to extract oxygen was a process known for a long time. Probably true, but this is the first I've heard of it (Disclaimer: I am not a Chemist or Chemical Engineer... in fact, I'm not even a real Scientist! <g>)

But, this is interesting!

In the case of water, electrolysis yields Oxygen and Hydrogen (is Hydrogen a metal? Some scientists say 'yes -- but only at a very high pressure'). In the case of a metal mixed with Oxygen; an oxide; apparently oxides have to be heated to very high temperatures and mixed with a salt (compare this to H2O being mixed with a salt prior to electrolysis, AFAIK, the salt is just there to make the H2O conductive to a voltage), and then electrolyzed and then you can extract the oxygen.

Now, I wonder if the process could be completed without a salt, because well, H2O can be electrolyzed without a salt -- you just get a whole lot less Hydrogen and Oxygen bubbles -- this is because not as much current is going through the water without the salt added.

That's because water without additives acts as a resistor.

The salt basically makes the solution into less of a resistor, and more of a conductor.

But let's say we wanted to accomplish this feat without adding the salt. How might we accomplish this?

Well, we could raise the voltage to compensate for the resistance that needs to be overcome.

Yes, this would mean lowering the current of the electrodes proportionally.

But, maybe we could use a trick, like the way a Xenon flash bulb is lit -- to make this thing happen.

Basically, in a Xenon flash bulb, a very quickly occurring high-voltage arc pulse first ionizes the Xenon gas, then a secondary much lower voltage (but much higher current) is continuously passed across the now-conductive ionized path blazed by the initial high voltage pulse.

So I wonder if something like that could work to extract oxygen from lunar regolith, without requiring (or requiring as much!) salt... or heck, heat even(!)... perhaps you could do something like get the oxygen out at lower temperatures...

It would just be a question of enough voltage to start the circuit -- and subsequently enough current to sustain it...

It's also equal-and-oppositely possible that all of the above is a complete and total crackpot theory...

...Take all of the above with the proverbial... "grain of salt"... <g>

(Pun intended... <g>)

This is really stupid. They've managed to take stuff that's so difficult to find that you literally have to go to the freaking moon to get it, and turn it into something that is literally everywhere all over earth. What a bunch of idiots.

On a more serious note, is the high energy demands of this process a blocker at all? Or can we just assume that energy (solar) is abundant on the moon?

You have invented electrolysis.

You can't breathe that oxygen, however, unless you blend it with 4 parts of nitrogen or something similarly more massive than the oxygen to slow down fires.