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Blue Origin manufactured solar cell prototype from lunar regolith simulants

317 points by LLcolD 4y ago

xt00 4y ago
I'm sure ULA who has been waiting for years for some engines to fly their new rocket is uber excited about this.. /s :-) so maybe they will fly Vulcan this year??
- trollerator23 4y ago
  How's that relevant?
wonderwonder 4y ago
If this works (big if) and they are able to essentially build a solar panel factory in a box and if lab grown protein is both able to scale and be shipped in a modular structure (big if) they have effectively solved or close to solved 2 of the largest challenges involved in establishing moon or mars based colonies. Food and power. Science fiction is sneaking up on us. If it can be automated you could essentially launch space craft factories that land and build solar panels prior to humans arriving. Far fetched but neat to think about. Approaching von Neumann probe territory
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- panick21_ 4y ago
  There is also a cool idea about building robots that use things like ice to build themselves bodies and can build versions of themselves. You likely still have to send along a whole lot of electronics pars because making those on the spot would be difficult.
  - chairhairair 4y ago
    Yes making ice-based self-replicating robots is “difficult”…
    - panick21_ 4y ago
      We are also don't have much real research into actually trying it. And it doesn't have to all the way self-replicating. It more like using local materials to build the heavy parts of robots. Maybe those robots then couldn't build another one of themselves.
      - hef19898 4y ago
        Unless space ice has mechanical properties comparable to steel, I don't see the point in even trying...
        dotnet00 4y ago
        While ice is a somewhat extreme example, the idea of bringing over the electronics and using local materials to put together whatever structural components are needed isn't that crazy. It'd save a lot of mass, and things like 3d printers can produce them with reasonable precision. There already is a decent amount of research into the prospect of 3d printing structures with Lunar or Martian regolith, so structural components for robots or machines don't seem too crazy.
        panick21_ 4y ago
        I don't remember the details and I don't remember the exact place where I have heard and interview with somebody that works on this stuff. They wouldn't use pure ice. But in cold places, with ice mixed with some other materials you can actually make quite good materials. Consider that in most places gravity is much lower then on earth so it doesn't need to be carbon fiber to be useful.
        hef19898 4y ago
        I said steel, not carbon fibre. And even in zero-g things still have mass to them that needs to be handled, don't they?
  - Vikerchu 4y ago
    Fusion\fission refining? ??????
- px43 4y ago
  There's basically zero carbon on the moon. A ton of it on Mars though (lots of CO2 ice). Our moon is something like 45% silica on the surface. That is a fuckton of silicon. Step one is definitely making a solar panel factory, and then using that power to smelt aluminum, iron, titanium, etc. It seems to me that the moon would make for a good floating semiconductor fab, and eventually, data center. It would be great for making large structures for spacecraft, since the materials are right, and the lower gravity makes it much cheaper to get the parts into space. It doesn't make sense for a ton of people to live there, since we would have to bring all of our own carbon, which is kind of important for biological life.
  - jbattle 4y ago
    Assuming abundant power and effective carbon recapture / recycling, how much carbon do you need per person? If it was on the order of 50 lbs of carbon per person, and that could be infinitely recycled, that doesn't seem wildly onerous. It looks like the average person exhales about 2 pounds of carbon per day, so that's a very rough baseline in terms of carbon needs. Is there a technology available now or soon that can scrub carbon out of the ambient air and capture that in an easy to reuse medium?
    - px43 4y ago
      ~~Yeah, I think carbon recycling can be pretty good. They've been doing it on submarines for a while.~~ (edit: nevermind, I was confused about the submarine thing, the user "idlewords" below has a lot of good commentary about this) At any given moment, any human is about 18% carbon. Carbon is also pretty important in *carbo*hydrates. Any plants that we would grow would need a ton of carbon. It can be done, but any moon colony will basically always be dependent on getting extra carbon from Earth, so it can never be "self sufficient" in the way that Mars can eventually be. It is kind of funny that on Earth, we're obsessed with capturing and burying as much carbon as possible, when it's going to be an incredibly valuable resource on the moon, assuming that a bunch of people are gong to want to live there.
      - wonderwonder 4y ago
- Teever 4y ago
  My personal take on things is that we're far closer to von Neumann probe level technology than anyone seems to be aware of, and we're just sort of sleep walking into a crazy new future. I wish more people on HN would talk about von Nuemann probes and things like seed factories[0] instead of smartphone apps and people pooping on the streets of San Francisco. [0] https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Seed_Factories https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Seed_Factories
  - wonderwonder 4y ago
    This looks like a good read, thanks for this. I had not heard of a seed factory before.
    - Teever 4y ago
      Yeah, I've tried posting it on HN before but it never gained any traction. It is a fascinating read and the author is active on reddit[0] and he'll answer any questions you have about the book. I just reposted it[1], Let's see if it gets some comments this time. [0] https://www.reddit.com/user/danielravennest https://www.reddit.com/user/danielravennest [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34795006 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34795006
  - gene-h 4y ago
    Making solar cells like this is a nice first step to making self replicating machines. Being able to make solar cells is especially interesting because these are semiconductor devices, so producing control electronics may be possible too. But really what needs to be solved for self-replicating machines is determining a way to make actuators. On the Moon this is harder due to the difficulty of making bearings and gears. Because of vacuum welding making bearings is much more difficult. While solid lubricants do exist, it's difficult to obtain the materials necessary on the Moon. Traditional machining and polishing processes don't work well in a vacuum either due to vacuum welding and the inability to use lubricant. If we wish to carry out said processes in a pressurized environment we run into another problem: seals. In order to make good seals we need elastomers, and elastomers require elements such as hydrogen, carbon, and nitrogen which are difficult to obtain on the Moon.
- gene-h 4y ago
  The approach they develop likely doesn't work on Mars. They rely on the ambient high vacuum environment of the Moon as part of the silicon purification step and likely for deposition of the solar cells. Mars is not high vacuum.
  - panick21_ 4y ago
    I listen to a podcast by somebody that works for a company that does this kind of thing. I think he said Mars atmo is so thin that many things actually work quite well based on their calculation, but it does lead to problems in some situations.
- 14 4y ago
  I too thought this is like something out of Star Trek how amazing would this be if it indeed works.
- idlewords 4y ago
  The second technology you mention is a bit of a non sequitur. What lab grown protein, shipped where? Right now there is no nutritionally complete food of any kind that is shelf-stable for three years; it's a major open problem in long-duration space flight.
  - wonderwonder 4y ago
    Food, power, shelter and air are essentially the big issues for space colonization. With the lab protein I was speaking of the possibility of shipping a close to self sustaining bio reactor in a box to a colony to solve for the food issue. I mentioned this as it's an evolving technology that may be closer to prime time at the same time as the solar panels concept the article mentioned.
    - outworlder 4y ago
      > I mentioned this as it's an evolving technology that may be closer to prime time Unlikely. We have yet to master nutrition when it comes from plants, it will be even worse for a bioreactor. Unfortunately, the list of food ingredients that you see listed in minimum recommended intake values is woefully incomplete. There's a whole bunch of micronutrients we get from food that are difficult to replicate. Bioreactors could be useful for making supplements (say, Omega-3) to offset specific deficiencies.
    - idlewords 4y ago
      Consider that such a technology would make anyone who invented it on Earth a billionaire many times over. But it's hard to do, even with plants and gravity.
  - outworlder 4y ago
    And even if we did have nutritionally stable food for this long, there's a growing amount of evidence that even just mechanical food processing is enough to make it _unhealthy_ – if it comprises the majority of your consumption – and that it causes metabolic problems (irrespective of additives). And that's on Earth. If we are to eat just processed food in space, we'll need a lot more research on this. It would be better if we just grew food from plants. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8747021/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8747021/
- TheRealNGenius 4y ago
  [dead]
politician 4y ago
They control for a lot of factors except, apparently, for gravity. It would be awesome if they scaled their foundry down to the size of a satellite and tested it in orbit.
- borjah 4y ago
  actually is 1/6th gravity, because you are going to produce it on the moon. I don't know how long the process is but maybe a vomit comet with a different parabola profile to imitate the moon gravity could do the trick.
  - politician 4y ago
    Yeah, I was thinking that they could launch into a microgravity environment and approximate the Moon's gravity by spinning the sat.
    - borjah 4y ago
      That would be also a good idea, albeit you need to automate the whole process...
mariusseufzer 4y ago
"Our proprietary transport subsystem [...]" That's where I stopped reading.
- ted_dunning 4y ago
  You should have read more carefully. They are talking about transport of molten regolith. Not rockets.
M95D 4y ago
So they can make a solar panel from regolith. Good, but not good enough. Can they build another reactor using only regolith, solar panels and their first reactor?
t43562 4y ago
Science fiction becoming reality. By the time it's in use on the moon nobody will be amazed by it. The same way nobody is amazed to hold a tiny world-communicator in their hand and communicate with people on the other side of the planet by video.
mlindner 4y ago
As long as they dont hamstring themselves by demanding they launch on only their own launch vehicles, this has some possibility. Better that they spin it out into a separate company that would give them the freedom of being launch provider agnostic.
- malfist 4y ago
  I wouldn't be surprised if they pivot, but the new glenn does look promising. Not as promising as starship, but starship's numbers are still Elon numbers, which aren't to be trusted
  - meepmorp 4y ago
    Musk and SpaceX parting ways would be great, imo.
    - TaylorAlexander 4y ago
      Agree. Shotwell at the helm would be fantastic.
      - panick21_ 4y ago
        Based on what? Do you just hold everything else constant and remove Musk. Is there any evidence that this would be the case? Seems to me that all evidence points in the opposite direction, and all companies not led by Musk are not nearly as ambitious, goals oriented and successful. If Musk had left the company in 2014, do you think Starship and Starlink would be what they are now? Because I think that is pretty unlikely.
        mlindner 4y ago
        Indeed if you go back in history at any point of SpaceX's past and simply pluck out Elon, lots of things that SpaceX does now simply wouldn't have happened.
        4y ago
ramesh31 4y ago
I would think they need an orbital class rocket first? Their timeline is making SLS look good by comparison.
- waitwhatuh 4y ago
  Would they? Surely they could also contract on other carriers?
- imiric 4y ago
  I wish space companies would cooperate for the benefit of all humankind, so that we wouldn't need to reinvent the wheel every time. Competition is good, but waiting for the entire production line to be solved by a single company would delay our efforts by decades. Let SpaceX focus on the rockets, and Blue Origin on bootstrapping a moon base.
panick21_ 4y ago
Talked about here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34774110 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34774110
alexfromapex 4y ago
Are they accounting for the oxygen input needed for the burning process?
- FourHand451 4y ago
  >our reactor produces iron, silicon, and aluminum through molten regolith electrolysis, in which an electrical current separates those elements from the oxygen to which they are bound. Oxygen for propulsion and life support is a byproduct. It sounds like there isn't oxygen input required.
- waitwhatuh 4y ago
  What burning process? There is heating without burning in this process (and in fact, most of the things being melted are oxides and the energy is used to pull oxygen off of the iron and silicon.) It's electrical heating, not coal fire heating, which requires no oxygen.
- johntb86 4y ago
  They're essentially unburning these materials - they're bound to oxygen when in the mineral, and they need to separate that out.
gene-h 4y ago
What they don't mention is how efficient the solar cells produced are. NASA's NIAC studied making solar cells in a similar manner and estimated they could produce solar cells with 6-9% efficiency[0]. Efficiency was limited due to impurities in the silicon they produced. They have made some pretty big improvements over the NIAC work by being able to produce cover glass, which the NIAC study didn't even consider. Another big question is how much mass needs to be shipped up from earth to manufacturer solar cells. Dopants will still need to be shipped up as they cannot currently be obtained with this method, but the mass per area solar cell is practically nothing. More concerning are the electrodes for their electrolysis cell. They are literally electrolyzing molten lava. Molten silicates are a very good solvent and the hot oxidizing environment of the anode is quite harsh. We do have materials which can withstand this environment, but how long will they last? How much power can the whole set up produce and would it be more than landing the setup's weight in solar cells? Regardless this is still a major advance. Materials processing of this level suitable for the lunar environment has not been previously demonstrated. [0]https://www.niac.usra.edu/files/library/meetings/annual/jun00/433Ignatiev.pdf https://www.niac.usra.edu/files/library/meetings/annual/jun0...
- dotnet00 4y ago
  They claim to achieve 99.999% purity on the silicon, so it sounds like they might do better than 6-9% on efficiency. But then again if they were anywhere near Earth produced panels, they would probably be saying that to everyone who would listen.
  - addaon 4y ago
    Nine nines is the usual target for semiconductor work… five nines is off-the-shelf. It’s impressive for “on the moon,” but I’d expect a significant performance shortfall from what we’re used to.
    - sacred_numbers 4y ago
      Surprisingly it appears not to be too far off standard solar panel efficiencies. According to this source[0], five nines silicon (5N) is called Upgraded Mettalurgical-grade (UMG) silicon. According to this paper[1], efficiencies over 20% have been reached with UMG silicon. [0]http://www.greenrhinoenergy.com/solar/technologies/pv_manufacturing.php http://www.greenrhinoenergy.com/solar/technologies/pv_manufa... [1]https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0038092X21002711#:~:text=20.76%25%20record%20efficiency https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00380....
Octokiddie 4y ago
> To make long-term presence on the Moon viable, we need abundant electrical power. We can make power systems on the Moon directly from materials that exist everywhere on the surface, without special substances brought from Earth. We have pioneered the technology and demonstrated all the steps. Our approach, Blue Alchemist, can scale indefinitely, eliminating power as a constraint anywhere on the Moon. There's a missing step in there - the production of solar cells on the lunar surface. Having the materials to do so is one thing, but being able to manufacture them to spec on the surface of the moon is another. The article only lightly touches on this. Still, this is a surprising achievement from an organization I didn't even know did chemistry.
kibwen 4y ago
This is an interesting development, although note that a full day-night cycle on the moon is 29 Earth-days long. This means that unless you want to have enough batteries to last two whole weeks, you're going to be limited to putting your solar-powered outpost in the few places with near-constant access to light; basically the high bits of craters near the poles.
- beakergordon 4y ago
  On this note, does anyone know the tentative plan for the upcoming Artemis missions? Looks like they're slated for 30 days, but at least a few of those will probably be spent in transfer orbits. It makes me wonder if that timeline is configured to line up to an exact day-only time window on the surface.
we_never_see_it 4y ago
I have started rooting for Blue Origin after Elon Musk turned out to be a right wing extremist. Good to see they are making progress.
- pkaye 4y ago
  There is also Stoke Space which is founded by former Blue Origin and SpaceX employees. Everyday Astronaut did a video on them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sS-0W6eHfjM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sS-0W6eHfjM
aj7 4y ago
One early Saturday morning around 1975 I walked into the Berkeley Physics Dept. student machine shop. A bunch of nerds were clustered around a big lathe that no one ever used because it had so much backlash. Chucked in the lathe was a vacuum flange monolithically attached to a broken glass tube that menacingly stuck out from the headstock. Inside the glass tube was some black gritty shit. The ways of the lathe had been carefully covered with pristine Kim-Wipes. I gathered that this was part of a mass spectrometer. The black shit were Apollo moon rocks that this group had analyzed for isotopic abundance. This grit was being reclaimed from the spectrometer glass-tube flange part. “We have to account for every last gram of this NASA sample.” There was a little residue off to the side. I touched it.
- UberFly 4y ago
  Finish the good story with the part about super powers...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- jh00ker 4y ago
  Half-way through reading the article I descended down a Wikipedia rabbit hole that eventually led me to this article [0] and dreaming of what it would be like to touch a moon rock. Thank you for your story! [0] https://www.nytimes.com/1995/12/02/nyregion/fbi-revisits-earthly-theft-of-moon-rock.html https://www.nytimes.com/1995/12/02/nyregion/fbi-revisits-ear...
  - johnwalkr 4y ago
    I recall touching one 3-4 times in my life at science museums. I’m not sure if my memory is totally correct on that but there is definitely one you can touch at Kennedy space Centre.
jasonlotito 4y ago
So, if this topic interests you, and you want to read a couple books related to it, I highly recommend Delta-V and then Critical Mass by Daniel Suarez. Both are sci-fi books, and deal with precisely this thing.
FredPret 4y ago
Reminds me of a book I just read - Critical Mass by Daniel Suarez
jh00ker 4y ago
Is there a concern of transferring mass between the Earth and Moon (at scale) and its effect on the movement of the planetary bodies over the very long term? I get that right now, the effect would be infinitesimally small. But some comments are talking about turning the moon into a massive factory, using the lunar materials to fabricate semiconductors, data centers, spacecraft. What happens when those products are exported from the moon, thereby reducing the mass of the moon? After hundreds of years of mining and exporting, could we see a change in tidal activity on the Earth, for example? If the moon's pull on the oceans decreased, could that actually help mitigate sea level rise?
- vkou 4y ago
  The total mass of everything humans have built on Earth is ~10^15 kg. The mass of the Moon is ~7 × 1^22 kilograms. We'll cook ourselves long before any amount of mass transfer becomes meaningful.
- johnwalkr 4y ago
  The moon has about 3000kg of material added per day.

317 points by LLcolD 4y ago

xt00 4y ago

I'm sure ULA who has been waiting for years for some engines to fly their new rocket is uber excited about this.. /s :-) so maybe they will fly Vulcan this year??

trollerator23 4y ago
How's that relevant?

wonderwonder 4y ago

If this works (big if) and they are able to essentially build a solar panel factory in a box and if lab grown protein is both able to scale and be shipped in a modular structure (big if) they have effectively solved or close to solved 2 of the largest challenges involved in establishing moon or mars based colonies. Food and power. Science fiction is sneaking up on us. If it can be automated you could essentially launch space craft factories that land and build solar panels prior to humans arriving. Far fetched but neat to think about. Approaching von Neumann probe territory

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
panick21_ 4y ago
There is also a cool idea about building robots that use things like ice to build themselves bodies and can build versions of themselves. You likely still have to send along a whole lot of electronics pars because making those on the spot would be difficult.
- chairhairair 4y ago
  Yes making ice-based self-replicating robots is “difficult”…
  - panick21_ 4y ago
    We are also don't have much real research into actually trying it. And it doesn't have to all the way self-replicating. It more like using local materials to build the heavy parts of robots. Maybe those robots then couldn't build another one of themselves.
    - hef19898 4y ago
      Unless space ice has mechanical properties comparable to steel, I don't see the point in even trying...
      - dotnet00 4y ago
        While ice is a somewhat extreme example, the idea of bringing over the electronics and using local materials to put together whatever structural components are needed isn't that crazy. It'd save a lot of mass, and things like 3d printers can produce them with reasonable precision. There already is a decent amount of research into the prospect of 3d printing structures with Lunar or Martian regolith, so structural components for robots or machines don't seem too crazy.
      - panick21_ 4y ago
        I don't remember the details and I don't remember the exact place where I have heard and interview with somebody that works on this stuff. They wouldn't use pure ice. But in cold places, with ice mixed with some other materials you can actually make quite good materials. Consider that in most places gravity is much lower then on earth so it doesn't need to be carbon fiber to be useful.
        hef19898 4y ago
        I said steel, not carbon fibre. And even in zero-g things still have mass to them that needs to be handled, don't they?
- Vikerchu 4y ago
  Fusion\fission refining? ??????
px43 4y ago
There's basically zero carbon on the moon. A ton of it on Mars though (lots of CO2 ice). Our moon is something like 45% silica on the surface. That is a fuckton of silicon. Step one is definitely making a solar panel factory, and then using that power to smelt aluminum, iron, titanium, etc. It seems to me that the moon would make for a good floating semiconductor fab, and eventually, data center. It would be great for making large structures for spacecraft, since the materials are right, and the lower gravity makes it much cheaper to get the parts into space. It doesn't make sense for a ton of people to live there, since we would have to bring all of our own carbon, which is kind of important for biological life.
- jbattle 4y ago
  Assuming abundant power and effective carbon recapture / recycling, how much carbon do you need per person? If it was on the order of 50 lbs of carbon per person, and that could be infinitely recycled, that doesn't seem wildly onerous. It looks like the average person exhales about 2 pounds of carbon per day, so that's a very rough baseline in terms of carbon needs. Is there a technology available now or soon that can scrub carbon out of the ambient air and capture that in an easy to reuse medium?
  - px43 4y ago
    ~~Yeah, I think carbon recycling can be pretty good. They've been doing it on submarines for a while.~~ (edit: nevermind, I was confused about the submarine thing, the user "idlewords" below has a lot of good commentary about this) At any given moment, any human is about 18% carbon. Carbon is also pretty important in *carbo*hydrates. Any plants that we would grow would need a ton of carbon. It can be done, but any moon colony will basically always be dependent on getting extra carbon from Earth, so it can never be "self sufficient" in the way that Mars can eventually be. It is kind of funny that on Earth, we're obsessed with capturing and burying as much carbon as possible, when it's going to be an incredibly valuable resource on the moon, assuming that a bunch of people are gong to want to live there.
    - wonderwonder 4y ago
Teever 4y ago
My personal take on things is that we're far closer to von Neumann probe level technology than anyone seems to be aware of, and we're just sort of sleep walking into a crazy new future. I wish more people on HN would talk about von Nuemann probes and things like seed factories[0] instead of smartphone apps and people pooping on the streets of San Francisco. [0] https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Seed_Factories https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Seed_Factories
- wonderwonder 4y ago
  This looks like a good read, thanks for this. I had not heard of a seed factory before.
  - Teever 4y ago
    Yeah, I've tried posting it on HN before but it never gained any traction. It is a fascinating read and the author is active on reddit[0] and he'll answer any questions you have about the book. I just reposted it[1], Let's see if it gets some comments this time. [0] https://www.reddit.com/user/danielravennest https://www.reddit.com/user/danielravennest [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34795006 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34795006
- gene-h 4y ago
  Making solar cells like this is a nice first step to making self replicating machines. Being able to make solar cells is especially interesting because these are semiconductor devices, so producing control electronics may be possible too. But really what needs to be solved for self-replicating machines is determining a way to make actuators. On the Moon this is harder due to the difficulty of making bearings and gears. Because of vacuum welding making bearings is much more difficult. While solid lubricants do exist, it's difficult to obtain the materials necessary on the Moon. Traditional machining and polishing processes don't work well in a vacuum either due to vacuum welding and the inability to use lubricant. If we wish to carry out said processes in a pressurized environment we run into another problem: seals. In order to make good seals we need elastomers, and elastomers require elements such as hydrogen, carbon, and nitrogen which are difficult to obtain on the Moon.
gene-h 4y ago
The approach they develop likely doesn't work on Mars. They rely on the ambient high vacuum environment of the Moon as part of the silicon purification step and likely for deposition of the solar cells. Mars is not high vacuum.
- panick21_ 4y ago
  I listen to a podcast by somebody that works for a company that does this kind of thing. I think he said Mars atmo is so thin that many things actually work quite well based on their calculation, but it does lead to problems in some situations.
14 4y ago
I too thought this is like something out of Star Trek how amazing would this be if it indeed works.
idlewords 4y ago
The second technology you mention is a bit of a non sequitur. What lab grown protein, shipped where? Right now there is no nutritionally complete food of any kind that is shelf-stable for three years; it's a major open problem in long-duration space flight.
- wonderwonder 4y ago
  Food, power, shelter and air are essentially the big issues for space colonization. With the lab protein I was speaking of the possibility of shipping a close to self sustaining bio reactor in a box to a colony to solve for the food issue. I mentioned this as it's an evolving technology that may be closer to prime time at the same time as the solar panels concept the article mentioned.
  - outworlder 4y ago
    > I mentioned this as it's an evolving technology that may be closer to prime time Unlikely. We have yet to master nutrition when it comes from plants, it will be even worse for a bioreactor. Unfortunately, the list of food ingredients that you see listed in minimum recommended intake values is woefully incomplete. There's a whole bunch of micronutrients we get from food that are difficult to replicate. Bioreactors could be useful for making supplements (say, Omega-3) to offset specific deficiencies.
  - idlewords 4y ago
    Consider that such a technology would make anyone who invented it on Earth a billionaire many times over. But it's hard to do, even with plants and gravity.
- outworlder 4y ago
  And even if we did have nutritionally stable food for this long, there's a growing amount of evidence that even just mechanical food processing is enough to make it _unhealthy_ – if it comprises the majority of your consumption – and that it causes metabolic problems (irrespective of additives). And that's on Earth. If we are to eat just processed food in space, we'll need a lot more research on this. It would be better if we just grew food from plants. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8747021/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8747021/
TheRealNGenius 4y ago
[dead]

politician 4y ago

They control for a lot of factors except, apparently, for gravity. It would be awesome if they scaled their foundry down to the size of a satellite and tested it in orbit.

borjah 4y ago
actually is 1/6th gravity, because you are going to produce it on the moon. I don't know how long the process is but maybe a vomit comet with a different parabola profile to imitate the moon gravity could do the trick.
- politician 4y ago
  Yeah, I was thinking that they could launch into a microgravity environment and approximate the Moon's gravity by spinning the sat.
  - borjah 4y ago
    That would be also a good idea, albeit you need to automate the whole process...

mariusseufzer 4y ago

"Our proprietary transport subsystem [...]" That's where I stopped reading.

ted_dunning 4y ago
You should have read more carefully. They are talking about transport of molten regolith. Not rockets.

M95D 4y ago

So they can make a solar panel from regolith. Good, but not good enough. Can they build another reactor using only regolith, solar panels and their first reactor?

t43562 4y ago

Science fiction becoming reality. By the time it's in use on the moon nobody will be amazed by it. The same way nobody is amazed to hold a tiny world-communicator in their hand and communicate with people on the other side of the planet by video.

mlindner 4y ago

As long as they dont hamstring themselves by demanding they launch on only their own launch vehicles, this has some possibility. Better that they spin it out into a separate company that would give them the freedom of being launch provider agnostic.

malfist 4y ago
I wouldn't be surprised if they pivot, but the new glenn does look promising. Not as promising as starship, but starship's numbers are still Elon numbers, which aren't to be trusted
- meepmorp 4y ago
  Musk and SpaceX parting ways would be great, imo.
  - TaylorAlexander 4y ago
    Agree. Shotwell at the helm would be fantastic.
    - panick21_ 4y ago
      Based on what? Do you just hold everything else constant and remove Musk. Is there any evidence that this would be the case? Seems to me that all evidence points in the opposite direction, and all companies not led by Musk are not nearly as ambitious, goals oriented and successful. If Musk had left the company in 2014, do you think Starship and Starlink would be what they are now? Because I think that is pretty unlikely.
      - mlindner 4y ago
        Indeed if you go back in history at any point of SpaceX's past and simply pluck out Elon, lots of things that SpaceX does now simply wouldn't have happened.
      - 4y ago

ramesh31 4y ago

I would think they need an orbital class rocket first? Their timeline is making SLS look good by comparison.

waitwhatuh 4y ago
Would they? Surely they could also contract on other carriers?
imiric 4y ago
I wish space companies would cooperate for the benefit of all humankind, so that we wouldn't need to reinvent the wheel every time. Competition is good, but waiting for the entire production line to be solved by a single company would delay our efforts by decades. Let SpaceX focus on the rockets, and Blue Origin on bootstrapping a moon base.

panick21_ 4y ago

Talked about here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34774110 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34774110

alexfromapex 4y ago

Are they accounting for the oxygen input needed for the burning process?

FourHand451 4y ago
>our reactor produces iron, silicon, and aluminum through molten regolith electrolysis, in which an electrical current separates those elements from the oxygen to which they are bound. Oxygen for propulsion and life support is a byproduct. It sounds like there isn't oxygen input required.
waitwhatuh 4y ago
What burning process? There is heating without burning in this process (and in fact, most of the things being melted are oxides and the energy is used to pull oxygen off of the iron and silicon.) It's electrical heating, not coal fire heating, which requires no oxygen.
johntb86 4y ago
They're essentially unburning these materials - they're bound to oxygen when in the mineral, and they need to separate that out.

gene-h 4y ago

What they don't mention is how efficient the solar cells produced are. NASA's NIAC studied making solar cells in a similar manner and estimated they could produce solar cells with 6-9% efficiency[0]. Efficiency was limited due to impurities in the silicon they produced. They have made some pretty big improvements over the NIAC work by being able to produce cover glass, which the NIAC study didn't even consider. Another big question is how much mass needs to be shipped up from earth to manufacturer solar cells. Dopants will still need to be shipped up as they cannot currently be obtained with this method, but the mass per area solar cell is practically nothing. More concerning are the electrodes for their electrolysis cell. They are literally electrolyzing molten lava. Molten silicates are a very good solvent and the hot oxidizing environment of the anode is quite harsh. We do have materials which can withstand this environment, but how long will they last? How much power can the whole set up produce and would it be more than landing the setup's weight in solar cells? Regardless this is still a major advance. Materials processing of this level suitable for the lunar environment has not been previously demonstrated. [0]https://www.niac.usra.edu/files/library/meetings/annual/jun00/433Ignatiev.pdf https://www.niac.usra.edu/files/library/meetings/annual/jun0...

dotnet00 4y ago
They claim to achieve 99.999% purity on the silicon, so it sounds like they might do better than 6-9% on efficiency. But then again if they were anywhere near Earth produced panels, they would probably be saying that to everyone who would listen.
- addaon 4y ago
  Nine nines is the usual target for semiconductor work… five nines is off-the-shelf. It’s impressive for “on the moon,” but I’d expect a significant performance shortfall from what we’re used to.
  - sacred_numbers 4y ago
    Surprisingly it appears not to be too far off standard solar panel efficiencies. According to this source[0], five nines silicon (5N) is called Upgraded Mettalurgical-grade (UMG) silicon. According to this paper[1], efficiencies over 20% have been reached with UMG silicon. [0]http://www.greenrhinoenergy.com/solar/technologies/pv_manufacturing.php http://www.greenrhinoenergy.com/solar/technologies/pv_manufa... [1]https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0038092X21002711#:~:text=20.76%25%20record%20efficiency https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00380....

Octokiddie 4y ago

> To make long-term presence on the Moon viable, we need abundant electrical power. We can make power systems on the Moon directly from materials that exist everywhere on the surface, without special substances brought from Earth. We have pioneered the technology and demonstrated all the steps. Our approach, Blue Alchemist, can scale indefinitely, eliminating power as a constraint anywhere on the Moon. There's a missing step in there - the production of solar cells on the lunar surface. Having the materials to do so is one thing, but being able to manufacture them to spec on the surface of the moon is another. The article only lightly touches on this. Still, this is a surprising achievement from an organization I didn't even know did chemistry.

kibwen 4y ago

This is an interesting development, although note that a full day-night cycle on the moon is 29 Earth-days long. This means that unless you want to have enough batteries to last two whole weeks, you're going to be limited to putting your solar-powered outpost in the few places with near-constant access to light; basically the high bits of craters near the poles.

beakergordon 4y ago
On this note, does anyone know the tentative plan for the upcoming Artemis missions? Looks like they're slated for 30 days, but at least a few of those will probably be spent in transfer orbits. It makes me wonder if that timeline is configured to line up to an exact day-only time window on the surface.

we_never_see_it 4y ago

I have started rooting for Blue Origin after Elon Musk turned out to be a right wing extremist. Good to see they are making progress.

pkaye 4y ago
There is also Stoke Space which is founded by former Blue Origin and SpaceX employees. Everyday Astronaut did a video on them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sS-0W6eHfjM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sS-0W6eHfjM

aj7 4y ago

One early Saturday morning around 1975 I walked into the Berkeley Physics Dept. student machine shop. A bunch of nerds were clustered around a big lathe that no one ever used because it had so much backlash. Chucked in the lathe was a vacuum flange monolithically attached to a broken glass tube that menacingly stuck out from the headstock. Inside the glass tube was some black gritty shit. The ways of the lathe had been carefully covered with pristine Kim-Wipes. I gathered that this was part of a mass spectrometer. The black shit were Apollo moon rocks that this group had analyzed for isotopic abundance. This grit was being reclaimed from the spectrometer glass-tube flange part. “We have to account for every last gram of this NASA sample.” There was a little residue off to the side. I touched it.

UberFly 4y ago
Finish the good story with the part about super powers...
deleted 4y ago
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jh00ker 4y ago
Half-way through reading the article I descended down a Wikipedia rabbit hole that eventually led me to this article [0] and dreaming of what it would be like to touch a moon rock. Thank you for your story! [0] https://www.nytimes.com/1995/12/02/nyregion/fbi-revisits-earthly-theft-of-moon-rock.html https://www.nytimes.com/1995/12/02/nyregion/fbi-revisits-ear...
- johnwalkr 4y ago
  I recall touching one 3-4 times in my life at science museums. I’m not sure if my memory is totally correct on that but there is definitely one you can touch at Kennedy space Centre.

jasonlotito 4y ago

So, if this topic interests you, and you want to read a couple books related to it, I highly recommend Delta-V and then Critical Mass by Daniel Suarez. Both are sci-fi books, and deal with precisely this thing.

FredPret 4y ago

Reminds me of a book I just read - Critical Mass by Daniel Suarez

jh00ker 4y ago

Is there a concern of transferring mass between the Earth and Moon (at scale) and its effect on the movement of the planetary bodies over the very long term? I get that right now, the effect would be infinitesimally small. But some comments are talking about turning the moon into a massive factory, using the lunar materials to fabricate semiconductors, data centers, spacecraft. What happens when those products are exported from the moon, thereby reducing the mass of the moon? After hundreds of years of mining and exporting, could we see a change in tidal activity on the Earth, for example? If the moon's pull on the oceans decreased, could that actually help mitigate sea level rise?

vkou 4y ago
The total mass of everything humans have built on Earth is ~10^15 kg. The mass of the Moon is ~7 × 1^22 kilograms. We'll cook ourselves long before any amount of mass transfer becomes meaningful.
johnwalkr 4y ago
The moon has about 3000kg of material added per day.