Ditto. The cost of space travel coupled with the problem of mining in a far away and hostile environment coupled with the problem of the extensive weight of minerals simply doesn’t make it a financially viable enterprise. It would have to be one of the those Star Trek things where they discover a new, amazing substance that is not found on earth, which makes all that worth the effort.
This is about mineral processing on the moon. Lets take Aluminum for example.
Bauxite/Alumina on earth is mined and then washed to remove silica. How would we wash minerals on the moon without water. Even if we did have water, it evaporates very quickly in vacuum.
We have large chambers with vacuum in the chemical/power energy and these vacuums are hard to maintain with frequent leaks. We have vacuums in Steam Turbine Condensers, Vacuum evaporators (milk and food processing) and semiconductor processing.
After washing alumina, it needs to be digested in an alkali like Sodium hydroxide. After a few other steps, Aluminum hydroxide needs to be precipitated out. Then it needs to be calcined (heated at high temperature) - to make good alumina (some crystalline forms of alumina need to avoided). All this requires utilities
Then this alumina is melted in a bath of cryolite (a mixture of sodium and aluminum fluorides) at around 1000c around 1850F and electrolyzed. You need plenty (read 100s of MWs of electricity ) and electrodes made of carbon / graphite. The carbon/graphite burns with the produced oxygen and is a consumable. Molten aluminum is volatile and will evaporate in vacuum.
Bauxite → Aluminum is process that requires significant processing, utilities and unlike shipping or computers, there has not been much improvement in the technology in the last 50 or so years.
I do not see how you will be making Aluminum on moon even in the next 100 years or so, with the current technology development speed.
Whenever people talk about exploiting the moon for resources I’m reminded that we have an entire continent on this planet that has largely been unexploited because of distance and harsh environmental conditions that are enormously less challenging than those a quarter million miles away.
Agreed.
Driving shipping costs down was pointed out as an example for technical/scale innovation.
While that is a great success story, I’d like to point out that for centuries people have tried to explore the Ocean depths and failed miserably. Almost all legends and scientific literature tells of numerable riches lying at the ocean depths - but exploring them has not been feasible. Sure there have been bathometers but unlike transcontinental ships, they have remained unfeasible.
The point is that space travel may turn out to be like deep ocean travel too. Stuff of science fiction!
That’s leaving aside that the lunar aluminium isn’t even in the form of bauxite. Getting it out of lunar anorthite would take acid leaching.
At this point, the main protection is international treaties agreeing not to disturb the environment. Ditto for undersea resources. There are allegedly large nickel nodules on the deep sea floor, but the risk is if one country goes after them, then absent a treaty (of the Sea) everyone would have to jump in and get theirs, the result being the same random depredation that has helped make the current fish population what it is today.
Not sure about that. I have read the quote (atributed NASA oceanographer Dr. Gene Feldman) : “We have better maps of the surface of Mars and the moon than we do of the bottom of the ocean.”
From what I understand, Bathymetry never took off. All the promises of deep see tourism (just like space tourism) did not pan out.
I do not believe there is any international treaties that stops mining in deep sea. If we knew there was mineable lithium or platinum or gold at ocean depths, and there was the technology to mine them, I am pretty sure there will be a lot of mining activity going on.
The only “mining” activity that goes on currently is Oil extraction.
Plenty of oxygen on the Moon, in mineral form. What is missing is nitrogen. That is rare enough that it could make settlement very tricky; we need nitrogen to grow food. The Moon could be exploited by remote-controlled robots alone, and probably will be - for the foreseeable future. Robots are going to get increasingly capable in the coming decades.
Re. social controls in space colonies:
First, I could see lots of fringe groups with the resources to set out on their own founding their own colonies; i.e., lots of “Propernoun-ites” forming their own cults societies, which usually are heavy on conformity to that particular group’s founding rules.
Second, while “no guns” might be an indispensable rule for a habitat’s safety, it becomes somewhat hypocritical if the ruling clique has no problem with their enforcers using guns. If they’re that damn dangerous then nobody whatsoever should have them.
Now we’re straying into “right to bear arms” which is a whole separate debate (and I might point out, generally limited to USA). My point was not so much that, as that erratic and antisocial destructive, suicidal behaviour is far more risky in a colony where even the air you breathe is at risk. For the same reason people are not allowed to generally own and play with massive explosives on earth, people in space will need to be heavily monitored for erratic tendencies which may motivate them to do lethal damage. Not so much the equivalent of school shootings, but more the possibility their behaviour may lead them to things like shooting up the airlock so it cannot be closed, or blowing up the main oxygen plant or storage, or breaching the containment for a major part of the station or ship.
Recall the Columbine pair tried to also set off a propane tank timebomb in the crowded cafeteria, but it did not go off. (Most countries have the right to bear propane) Similarly, the Jan 6 pipe bombs for some reason did not go off, but were intended to. Sept 11 would have been far worse if the buildings were the total of the livable environment for the occupants. Such behaviour would have far worse consequences in an enclosed life support system.
The ocean-going ship analogy is not too far off the mark, but fortunately I can’t imagine easy destructive scenarios for that other than aiming for an iceberg. Still, a crazy person would have to be restrained and locked up. A ship (or aircraft) is rarely more than hours to days from a port. Space installations could be months from any help. in the days of sailing when the ship would be months from a destination, the best a miscreant could hope for was to dropped off like Robinson Crusoe or Captain Bligh - not a space option. Hanging from the yardarm is possibly the better analogy.
Moderator Note
This is another reminder that we are in FQ. There is still a lot of factual discussion to be had on this topic, so please keep all responses appropriate to FQ.
Social issues, gun rights, etc. strays more into GD territory. Feel free to discuss those, but do so in the appropriate forum.
Well, that’s how you would do it on Earth, where chemicals are cheap and we have a particular distribution of ores. But that’s not the only possible process.
Lunarpedia mentions several possible processes:
https://lunarpedia.org/w/Lunar_Aluminum_Production
The FFC Cambridge Process in particular seems promising:
https://lunarpedia.org/w/FFC_Cambridge_Process
It works directly with anorthite (CaAl2Si2O8), which is prevalent on the Moon, and produces other useful materials as a byproduct. The disadvantage is that it requires chlorine as an input–but the chlorine is recycled, so only a small fraction would be lost.
Probably not economical to ever ship back to Earth, but would act as an amplifier for lunar development. Ship 100 tons of chlorine to the surface, get 10,000 tons of aluminum for local or orbital use.
No - that’s not correct.
It is done that way because we have learned over decades about the impurities inherent on earth, failure modes inherent to materials, safety, logistics, and a long list of other items.
Cold Fusion seemed very promising to me since I was a kid.
NASA tried their level hard for many decades to make tiles that could withstand the re-entry temperature of 1200C or so, and we all know how successful they were.
Bear in mind the tiles in NASA’s case were to withstand that temperature only for a few minutes : the FFC Cambridge process demands that happens 24/7 with no chance of maintenance. And that too this container needs to contain flowing liquid metals which are very erosive.
I have worked with molten metals and slags and high temperatures - and let me assure you we are not there. We wont be there for a long time judging by the investment / research.
If you read through the FFC Cambridge process, there are so many other unsurmountable problems - for example, they talk about gravity separation of molten Silicon, Aluminum, …etc without thinking that the moon has 1/6th the gravity of earth and it has been shown numerous times that gravity separations do not work the way it does on earth.
Why would any of those same lessons translate to the Moon?
Fundamentally, though, this is why we won’t know if sustained lunar (or Martian) development is possible until we try it. Everything that we have learned on Earth is useless, while the factors that are important are unknown. We can guess at some of them, but we won’t really know until we go there.
Cold fusion was always nonsense. There was never an explanation of how it was supposed to work, even in principle, and went against known physics. And it had the basic properly of all quack science, which is that it starts with a small anomalous measurement, but never widens that gap. Good science quickly pries open the gap or establishes that there is none.
NASA’s tiles are perfectly fine with the heat load. In fact they’re quite incredible materials. They’re just fragile and hard to work with. The irregular shape of the Shuttle didn’t help, either.
I see nothing about the FFC process that indicates it violates known chemistry or anything else.
At any rate, that is not the only possible process. In fact it’s possible to simply use high power lasers to disassociate the aluminum atoms with the rest. It’s not an energy efficient process, and would be totally impractical on Earth, but again–all of the knowledge we’ve gained here is useless there, because every design constraint is different.
This affects even things like the optimized balance between capital and running costs. You get cheap solar power on the Moon–for 15 days, and then nothing for another 15 days. This suggests that a process with low capital costs but high energy inputs could be successful. You run the equipment with a 50% duty cycle and then put the personnel on some other task the rest of the time. Earth manufacturing just doesn’t work like that.
Apologies. This did seem to be straying.
Another point to ponder, however, is that unless/until we have robots capable of understanding higher level instructions and significant autonomy to make decisions, they will need to be managed locally. As anyone on a Zoom call may have noted, there’s an annoying delay in simple earth communications. Round trip to the moon and back is at least 3 seconds. Whether that’s a manageable delay for directing an industrial process depends upon the autonomy level of the robots; but I suspect there will still need to be an operator booth, and so a base on the moon (or orbiting). It can be called on when human intervention is required and to do direct managing of processes.
And Mars, or an asteroid, we’re talking minutes to hours round trip communications. IIRC the Mars rovers are doing 1/10mph due to the round trip time and the need for caution. Alternatively, the processing units will be slow and simple. A breakthrough at 1000° or more could destroy the equipment before the operator can react.
That cite is dumb. Just, ridiculously dumb.
When they say this:
The Anorthosite which makes up the Lunar highlands is a mix of Plagioclases, Olivines, and Pyroxenes. To separate the anorthite, anorthosite must be ground. Then, magnetic separation could leave the non-magnetic anorthite.
Olivine and pyroxene aren’t any more magnetic than anorthite.
That kind of delay is very common for machines (autonomous and semi-autonomous) working for Oil/Gas Rigs (Exploration ) on the ocean bottom. This is because electromagnetic waves do not propagate well under water and so acoustic transducers are used.
I can never understand why people were so excited about room temperature fusion (for practical reasons, not theoretical ones). The whole purpose of using fusion to generate electricity is to produce enough heat to boil water. A cold fusion power plant would be about as useful as an indoor windmill.
Maybe not, but that doesn’t by itself exclude magnetic separation. If the minerals contained inclusions of, say, magnetite, you could still do a separation that way (assuming the anorthite did not have said inclusions).
Just snooping around, it appears that olivine at least is likely to have ferromagnetic inclusions.
Cold Fusion is fusion at Industrial Scale temperatures ~3000F or lower. I think we all knew that the million degree hot fusion temperatures of Sun were unfeasible.