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That’s not true. Regolith contains plenty of nitrogen and carbon. The moon is basically a giant Bussard collector. “Similarly, carbon and nitrogen have also b

That’s not true. Regolith contains plenty of nitrogen and carbon. The moon is basically a giant Bussard collector. “Similarly, carbon and nitrogen have also been implanted from the solar wind. The amount of nitrogen in a cubic meter of lunar regolith is similar to the amount of hydrogen-about 100 grams, or 3 percent of the nitrogen in a human body. The amount of carbon is twice that, the carbon beneath each square meter of the lunar surface is some 35 percent of the amount found tied up in living organisms per square meter of the Earth's surface.” https://space.nss.org/settlement/nasa/spaceresvol4/lifesupport.html https://space.nss.org/settlement/nasa/spaceresvol4/lifesuppo...

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russdill 4y ago
So 70,000 tons of regolith? I'm not a moon engineer or anything, but I think given the choice of bringing 70 tons of nitrogen, or the equipment to process that amount of regolith over a reasonable scale you'd just bring the nitrogen.
- credit_guy 4y ago
  Nice catch. Only it would not be 70000 tons, but one million tons of regolith.
  - fnordpiglet 4y ago
    On the other hand this is about 0.1 sqkm of lunar surface stripped and processed. This feels like a pretty small quarry mine on earth. Given that, it feels like it would probably be worth shipping the materials one would need to operate a quarry plus build the ISRU as without material environmental concerns you could process considerably more in a sustainable fashion than shipping elements from earth. The ISRU could extract all sorts of other useful materials - Oxygen Silicon (can be used to make plastics) Iron Aluminum Magnesium Sodium Potassium Phosphorus Etc Power would be abundant to fuel the reactions via solar radiation. So I wouldn’t write it off, I think regolith processing would be foundational for establishing any meaningful presence. Likely it can be entirely automated as well.

deleted 4y ago

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russdill 4y ago

So 70,000 tons of regolith? I'm not a moon engineer or anything, but I think given the choice of bringing 70 tons of nitrogen, or the equipment to process that amount of regolith over a reasonable scale you'd just bring the nitrogen.

credit_guy 4y ago
Nice catch. Only it would not be 70000 tons, but one million tons of regolith.
- fnordpiglet 4y ago
  On the other hand this is about 0.1 sqkm of lunar surface stripped and processed. This feels like a pretty small quarry mine on earth. Given that, it feels like it would probably be worth shipping the materials one would need to operate a quarry plus build the ISRU as without material environmental concerns you could process considerably more in a sustainable fashion than shipping elements from earth. The ISRU could extract all sorts of other useful materials - Oxygen Silicon (can be used to make plastics) Iron Aluminum Magnesium Sodium Potassium Phosphorus Etc Power would be abundant to fuel the reactions via solar radiation. So I wouldn’t write it off, I think regolith processing would be foundational for establishing any meaningful presence. Likely it can be entirely automated as well.