If we want to live on the Moon we need oxygen and NASA already knows how to extract it: with a giant mirror

Goodbye, Mars, the Moon has returned make it a priority. Really, except for an Elon Musk obsessed with terraform the red planetthe rest of the countries and even NASA had something between their minds: returning to the Moon. And come back in a big way, too, laying the foundations to create a settlement. For this we need oxygen, and NASA has just taken a great leap for humanity in the project to harvest oxygen from the lunar regolith.

And all thanks to a giant mirror.

In short. The Moon is a mine. Not only does it have enormous potential to obtain energy through photovoltaics, but it also has a huge amount of resources in its soil. The satellite is covered in ‘lunar dust’, also known as regolith, and part of its composition is oxygen. With current technology you can’t separate the chaff from the grain, but that’s where NASA’s carbothermal oxygen production reactor, or CaRD, project comes into play.

The mirror | Photo: NASA

The prototype installed on Earth is a reactor that has a huge precision mirror that concentrates a beam of sunlight on a reactor, heating its interior to temperatures of about 1,800ºC. The enormous amount of energy generated causes a carbothermic reaction which produces, among other elements, oxygen.

It is the evolution of the high-power laser that NASA development in 2023, but unlike that tool that needs an enormous amount of energy, and other solutions based on electrolysismirrors are nourished by the sunlight they can concentrate.

Regolith. According to According to the US agency, the technology “has the potential to produce several times its own weight in oxygen each year and in an automated manner, which will allow for a sustained human presence and the creation of a lunar economy.” And that lunar dust not only has oxygen.

The regolith is composed of O2, but also metals. If the different components can be separated, we can obtain other resources and, in addition, the resulting dust as waste can be used as construction material for make bricks and roads. In fact, there are projects to ‘dope the regolith with bacteria to be able to cultivate directly in the lunar soil.

The ESA approach. These advances by NASA occur while the rugged steps of the Artemis program which plans to take humans to lunar orbit this year, with future missions in which we will set foot on the satellite again. But as we said, the ESA also wants its piece of the pieand relies on electrolysis to separate metals from oxygen.

Regolith and urine cement: the best cement | Photo: ESA

The problem, as we said before, is the enormous amount of energy necessary to carry out the process. This molten salt electrolysis heats the regolith to 950ºC with calcium chloride to achieve the same objective that NASA has: release oxygen and separate it from iron and aluminum. And it is also collaborating with NASA to ensure that human presence in the medium term, experimenting with a mixture between human urine and regolith to create cement.

Everyone wants a piece of cheese. But the one who has plans as ambitious as those of the United States with the Moon is… China. The Asian giant is completing phases of the space race dizzying speedwith launches every two by three and some very aggressive plans. Before 2030 it wants to send its first astronauts to orbit the satellite, with a manned moon landing scheduled for 2029/2030.

Furthermore, together with Russia, they are building the International Lunar Research Station that they want to have in operation by 2030, complete by 2035 with thousands of scientists on board and with a nuclear reactor as a heart to get stable energy. When the enormous problem posed by the get oxygen stably on the Moona giant step will have been taken in international ambitions to place a long-term base on the satellite.

That is, furthermore, SpaceX’s new plan. Elon Musk confirmed a few days ago that Mars was no longer the priority because quick results are needed, and the Moon is a much more favorable scenario. There are many eyes focused on the same objective, one we haven’t stepped on since 1972.

Images | NASA, ESA

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