3 ms·

The moon is much more homogeneous. A kilo of regolith is a kilo of regolith. You don't need to find ore.

jiggawatts 2y ago
Which is another way of saying: There is no ore! Extracting pure elements out of undifferentiated regolith (dirt) is impractical and uneconomical here in Earth, even with abundant water, power, and even with chemicals such as carbon and acids. On the Moon you’d have to use a dry process in vacuum. What would that even look like!? Everyone seems to treat this like it’s a computer game with +1 resources per tile just waiting to be collected by a harvester. Explain in detail how you’d extract anything of industrial utility out of undifferentiated dirt, with a smelter light enough to launch on rockets for less than the cost of any alternative.
- russdill 2y ago
  Because ores on earth get concentrated the amount of iron in typical soil is very low. But on the moon, it ranges about 2 to 10% of total weight.
  - jiggawatts 2y ago
    > But on the moon, it ranges about 2 to 10% of total weight. That would not be classified as iron ore at all! Mined ores contain up to 65% iron by weight. Also, typical iron ore contains very little other metals, simplifying smelting and other processing. Moon rocks are a random undifferentiated mess. I recently read Blindsight by Peter Watts[1], and the aliens in that book use cyclotrons to separate asteroid material into their component elements. This is done in orbit, in a vacuum. Interestingly, something like that would work just fine on the Moon, because it has a negligible atmosphere -- essentially a hard vacuum. It might be possible to do an "outdoor" particle accelerator to separate regolith like a mass spectrometer. Imagine a device that uses concentrated solar power (or solar cells and an e-beam furnace) to vaporise regolith, ionise it, and then use magnets to spread it out in a huge fan hundreds of meters in size. The mass-separated atoms could be sprayed out onto the landscape where they would freeze onto the bare surface of the Moon. You'd get patches of pure metals slowly but surely building up. This would have almost no moving parts and needs no chemicals, oxidisers, or other consumables. [1] A book I can highly recommend for the HN audience. (It has been positively reviewed here previously, which is why I read it in the first place.)
    - russdill 2y ago
      If you want something really pure, or want things other than the core constituents, sure. Otherwise you can just smelt it. https://hothardware.com/news/blue-origin-details-lunar-plan-to-smelt-moon-dust-into-unlimited-solar-power https://hothardware.com/news/blue-origin-details-lunar-plan-... It's incredibly energy intensive and very inefficient compared to methods used on earth, but you aren't trying to compete with earth mining. You're trying to compete with the efficiency of shipping things to the moon. There's a ton of methods available: https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/stmd/university-of-utah-takes-top-honors-in-big-idea-lunar-forge-challenge/ https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/stmd/university-of-utah-ta... You can also grind it and perform chemical extraction: https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/spacegrant/2023/all2023/44/ https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/spacegrant/2023/all2023/44/

Which is another way of saying: There is no ore! Extracting pure elements out of undifferentiated regolith (dirt) is impractical and uneconomical here in Earth, even with abundant water, power, and even with chemicals such as carbon and acids. On the Moon you’d have to use a dry process in vacuum. What would that even look like!? Everyone seems to treat this like it’s a computer game with +1 resources per tile just waiting to be collected by a harvester. Explain in detail how you’d extract anything of industrial utility out of undifferentiated dirt, with a smelter light enough to launch on rockets for less than the cost of any alternative.

russdill 2y ago
Because ores on earth get concentrated the amount of iron in typical soil is very low. But on the moon, it ranges about 2 to 10% of total weight.
- jiggawatts 2y ago
  > But on the moon, it ranges about 2 to 10% of total weight. That would not be classified as iron ore at all! Mined ores contain up to 65% iron by weight. Also, typical iron ore contains very little other metals, simplifying smelting and other processing. Moon rocks are a random undifferentiated mess. I recently read Blindsight by Peter Watts[1], and the aliens in that book use cyclotrons to separate asteroid material into their component elements. This is done in orbit, in a vacuum. Interestingly, something like that would work just fine on the Moon, because it has a negligible atmosphere -- essentially a hard vacuum. It might be possible to do an "outdoor" particle accelerator to separate regolith like a mass spectrometer. Imagine a device that uses concentrated solar power (or solar cells and an e-beam furnace) to vaporise regolith, ionise it, and then use magnets to spread it out in a huge fan hundreds of meters in size. The mass-separated atoms could be sprayed out onto the landscape where they would freeze onto the bare surface of the Moon. You'd get patches of pure metals slowly but surely building up. This would have almost no moving parts and needs no chemicals, oxidisers, or other consumables. [1] A book I can highly recommend for the HN audience. (It has been positively reviewed here previously, which is why I read it in the first place.)
  - russdill 2y ago
    If you want something really pure, or want things other than the core constituents, sure. Otherwise you can just smelt it. https://hothardware.com/news/blue-origin-details-lunar-plan-to-smelt-moon-dust-into-unlimited-solar-power https://hothardware.com/news/blue-origin-details-lunar-plan-... It's incredibly energy intensive and very inefficient compared to methods used on earth, but you aren't trying to compete with earth mining. You're trying to compete with the efficiency of shipping things to the moon. There's a ton of methods available: https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/stmd/university-of-utah-takes-top-honors-in-big-idea-lunar-forge-challenge/ https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/stmd/university-of-utah-ta... You can also grind it and perform chemical extraction: https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/spacegrant/2023/all2023/44/ https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/spacegrant/2023/all2023/44/