4 ms·
There's also the cost of the diesel fuel (or whatever fuel you burn) to consider. With no native hydrocarbons on the moon, extracting them would be impossible.
by GlenTheMachine 4y ago
There's also the cost of the diesel fuel (or whatever fuel you burn) to consider. With no native hydrocarbons on the moon, extracting them would be impossible. So they would need to be launched from earth, at many tens of thousands of dollars per kilogram as an ongoing cost.
The biggest challenge to the obvious solutions - either solar plus lots of batteries, or nuclear - would be to crack water into oxygen and hydrogen, and then burn them during the night. The challenge there is storing the hydrogen. But if you do that, basically what you'd be doing is using hydrogen/oxygen as an energy storage mechanism, e.g. as a battery. You'd need to use solar during the day to crack the water.
- rini17 4y agoWhy store hydrogen when you can use the metals? I mentioned zinc as that's most mature technology, but almost all of them can be reacted with oxygen to get back energy.
- GlenTheMachine 4y agoBecause the content of metal in lunar soil is very very low.
- nine_k 4y agoNot really: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_soil#Mineralogy_and_composition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_soil#Mineralogy_and_comp... 12% by mass is iron, with calcium, aluminum, magnesium at 7-8%. These could be considered ores worth mining on Earth. All four metals readily burn in oxygen, even though aluminum needs some help igniting.