oxygen recovery from moon rocks

One great obstacle to moon colonisation is that there is no water/oxygen
easily available on-site (water especially troublesome). Given abundant
solar energy available on the moon, is it practical to recover oxygen
from moon rocks (which I assume are all oxides of various sorts)? That
also means that instead of bringing water only much lighter, more
compressible (if volatile) hydrogen is needed, with a bit of energy as a
biproduct when made into water. And you get iron metal, from splitting
the oxides.

Seb (knows only GCSE chemistry)

"Seb" wrote:

One great obstacle to moon colonisation is that there is no water/oxygen
easily available on-site (water especially troublesome). Given abundant
solar energy available on the moon, is it practical to recover oxygen
from moon rocks (which I assume are all oxides of various sorts)? That
also means that instead of bringing water only much lighter, more
compressible (if volatile) hydrogen is needed, with a bit of energy as a
biproduct when made into water. And you get iron metal, from splitting
the oxides.

Depends how you define practical. Lunar soil contains 45% Oxygen by
weight. Using Hydrogen and heating the soil (molten silicate electrolysis)
to release the Oxygen is the simplest method and would release about
10% of the Oxygen. You could probably extract more with the use of
chlorine or flourine processes.

"Ed" @ wrote in message
...

"Seb" wrote:

One great obstacle to moon colonisation is that there is no water/oxygen
easily available on-site (water especially troublesome). Given abundant
solar energy available on the moon, is it practical to recover oxygen
from moon rocks (which I assume are all oxides of various sorts)? That
also means that instead of bringing water only much lighter, more
compressible (if volatile) hydrogen is needed, with a bit of energy as a
biproduct when made into water. And you get iron metal, from splitting
the oxides.

Depends how you define practical. Lunar soil contains 45% Oxygen by
weight. Using Hydrogen and heating the soil (molten silicate
electrolysis)
to release the Oxygen is the simplest method and would release about
10% of the Oxygen. You could probably extract more with the use of
chlorine or flourine processes.

Why bother with chemistry? Bring on the mass spectrometer.
Grim

In message , Grimble Gromble
writes
"Ed" @ wrote in message
k...

"Seb" wrote:

One great obstacle to moon colonisation is that there is no water/oxygen
easily available on-site (water especially troublesome). Given abundant
solar energy available on the moon, is it practical to recover oxygen
from moon rocks (which I assume are all oxides of various sorts)? That
also means that instead of bringing water only much lighter, more
compressible (if volatile) hydrogen is needed, with a bit of energy as a
biproduct when made into water. And you get iron metal, from splitting
the oxides.

Depends how you define practical. Lunar soil contains 45% Oxygen by
weight. Using Hydrogen and heating the soil (molten silicate
electrolysis)
to release the Oxygen is the simplest method and would release about
10% of the Oxygen. You could probably extract more with the use of
chlorine or flourine processes.

Why bother with chemistry? Bring on the mass spectrometer.
Grim


Have you been reading Joe Haldeman's stories? A mass spectrometer is a
laboratory instrument for separating atoms and molecules almost one by
one. You aren't going to build Moonbase with it.
But I wonder if it would be more efficient to ship water and electrolyse
it, rather than liquid hydrogen which is very light and cryogenic.
--
What have they got to hide? Release the ESA Beagle 2 report.
Remove spam and invalid from address to reply.

Seb wrote:
One great obstacle to moon colonisation is that there is no water/oxygen
easily available on-site (water especially troublesome). Given abundant
solar energy available on the moon, is it practical to recover oxygen
from moon rocks (which I assume are all oxides of various sorts)? That
also means that instead of bringing water only much lighter, more
compressible (if volatile) hydrogen is needed, with a bit of energy as a
biproduct when made into water. And you get iron metal, from splitting
the oxides.

Seb (knows only GCSE chemistry)

My newsreader's missing most replies to the thread...
By "practical" I mean that recovering oxygen from rocks will be cheaper
than shipping it in at $ thousands/kg. Similarly water is expensive to
ship because of its bulk (cannot be compressed like gases). So if
there's oxygen on the moon you only need to bring the hydrogen (unless
transporting hydrogen is also very problematic).
All of which would be irrelevant if we do find significant amounts of
ice in the poles. But it's been suggested that solar energy is least
plentiful at the poles?

Seb

On Fri, 26 Nov 2004 16:15:50 +0100, Seb
wrote:

recover oxygen
from moon rocks

life is major source of O2 and CO2 on earth. Biggest component of the
atmospheres is N. So all of these have to come from somewhere.