3 ms·

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

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.