It’s more cost effective by many orders of magnitude.

we’ve already come up with numerous potential processes

These are bad science fiction based on naive extrapolation of NASA’s prior projects and bad attempts at lobbying for a NASA moon base. They are all very low MTR and low flexibility, and for very few of them has even a partial working prototype been built. They are also economically useless: it will be far cheaper to import volatiles to the moon from earth or the asteroid belt and use well-known processes with high MTR or high flexibility.

This industry-out-of-moondust meme is another economic and engineering fantasy created by NASA’s pouring vast amounts of engineering and space enthusiast dreams into an Apollo project to satisfy a political urge but that bore no relation to economically viable space goals or projects. It’s time to reboot: start with a blank notebook, forget everything you thought you learned from NASA or science fiction, aerospace engineering or your fellow space enthusiasts, about supposedly logical plans for space development. Get out a couple of good chemical and mechanical engineering textbooks, open up that notebook, learn to estimate economic viability without being prejudiced by your dreams, and come up with some ideas that have some real economic value.

It’s been almost 40 years since we’ve known enough about the chemistry of the Moon to design industrial processes. And we’ve already come up with numerous potential processes for extracting glass, aluminum, titanium, oxygen, etc from the default lunar soil. My take is that you grossly exaggerate the difficulty of developing new industrial techniques. As I see it, industry on the Moon can readily adapt to Lunar conditions. The chemistry isn’t a serious obstacle.

A grad student on Earth with some of the cruder lunar simulants could easily explore new lunar industrial processes. Total cost would be less than a few tens of thousands of dollars a year.

And it doesn’t need to become competitive with the Earth-side industrial processes to work well. After all, launch costs remain high meaning even a crude, inefficient process on the Moon, as long as it doesn’t require a lot of labor (at least on the Moon), can be competitive with Earth industry for heavy items.

I am referring to processes, not mere output. As every mechanical engineer and metallurgist knows, here is copious dependence on air, water, and other fluids in mechanisms and throughout the metallurgy industry. That one ignores this shows that one doesn’t have much of a mechanical engineering or metallurgy background, has not thought these problems through very far, or is simply clinging to an irrational religious belief in the body that hangs visibly in our own sky and the dream that has traditionally funded NASA.

As far as ISRU processes there are some that require little or no consumables.

These processes have much lower MTR and much lower flexibility than those we can conduct on earth, or those we could conduct other places with copious water, hydrocarbons, ammonia, etc. They again demonstrate the painful reality that the moon is an awful place for industry.

We naturally have a strong emotional attachment to our own moon, both because it floats tantalizingly in the sky right above us and because the moon was once the obsession of a political space race. But these considerations have nothing to do with real mining and chemical engineering. These prejudices are one of the biggest reasons to start with a blank notebook, a mining engineering book, and a chemical engineering book, and forget about what you thought you knew about space economics and ISRU. What you thought you knew is wrong. It’s not even close.

Meanwhile, there is plenty of opportunity to bend hardware today by working on deep sea ISRU, which is a booming industry. Instead of quasi-religious debates over heavenly bodies, and lobbying NASA to spend billions on this futuristic project instead of spending billions on that one, with deep sea ISRU real hardware and real economics are at work.

That some alloys are dependent upon hydrogen and carbon is true, nitrogen not so much. However, there are many high strength alloys made from nickel, cobalt, and titanium that do not. We use Titanium drill bits and other hardware in the machine shop industry all the time.

Also, machining today is moving in a dramatic fashion to lasers. With this move, your objections to machining withers. Today’s lasers are between 8-20% efficient for solid state lasers. The Army has put together solid state lasers with powers of up to 100 kilowatts.

As far as ISRU processes there are some that require little or no consumables. Vapor phase pyrolysis is one that has great potential for the Moon and only requires input heat from solar thermal and some electricity. I am looking at a further process that uses the same lasers as you would use for cutting for creating the vapor phase of metals.

Dr. Larry Taylor at the University of Tennessee used a standard microwave oven to heat real regolith (not the simulated crap) to over 1400 degrees C within 1 minute. That is hot enough to drive all volatiles out of the regolith (these are at concentrations of 10-100 times the concentration at the equator even out of the cold trap.). It only takes 1700 C to drive out the oxygen from magnesium, 1800 to get the oxygen out of iron, and 1900 to get the oxygen out of silicon.

The thing that is the enabler for the Moon is energy and that is where our early focus should be.

Dennis

http://www.flightglobal.com/articles/2008/04/23/223173/nasa-begins-work-to-solve-boil-off-problem.html

I’m afraid that, looked at from a chemical and mechanical engineering point of view, and from an economic point of view, there are some basic problems with these kinds of scenarios.

The simplest problem with this scenario to understand, but not the worst problem with it, is that earthside chemistry and (less obviously but not much less) machinery is thoroughly dependent on elements like hydrogen, carbon, and nitrogen that are scarce to practically nonexistant on the moon. Elements available on the moon count for far less than half of the mass of materials earthside industries depend on. Even most of what is available on the moon requires the more expensive kinds of chemistry, such as the splitting of aluminum and silicon oxides. It’s our very bad luck that our moon is an awful place to set up industry.

This could be remedied by importing ice from comets or asteroids, and it’s still possible we might get lucky and discover enough ice on the moon to get things going. But if one has to go to an asteroid or comet anyway, that body will have all the basic building blocks available, and in more easily extracted form (and how easily extraction and chemistry can be done is crucial), and thus will be where the real action is.

The much harder problem, whether on moons or asteroids or any other frontier, might be recognized by reading Adam Smith and then studying technologies used on frontiers as with the Polynesians or the Old West. Industry gains efficiency from division of labor, both among people and among machines. The more general-purpose a machine is, the lower its MTR.

On the frontier, if you want to be self-sufficient you sacrifice MTR. Contrast the village blacksmith’s shop, which can produce the wide variety of parts needed by the village and farms but is low MTR, with the steel mill on a railroad that is high MTR.

To take a modern example, CNC machines that cut out a wide variety of parts have very low MTRs. That is why, even if CNC machines were the only “seed” required to bootstrap industry, this bootstrapping would be an extremely slow process, as you suggest.

To get the high investments needed to get going one needs to deliver benefits to earthside customers, and to deliver benefits to earthside customers one needs high MTR. OTOH, the need for real options in these industries combined with the high cost of launching stuff from earth will urge towards more flexibility and self-sufficiency with lower MTRs. But the MTR still has to be high enough to make it cheaper than importing the various parts needed from earth. These will be the grand trade-offs to be made in building spacefaring civilization.

In the Old West if you added up the mass of all the people, livestock, lumber, mines, roads, carriages, shops, fields, barns, silos, warehouses, homes, and so on needed to make the minimal self-sufficient or self-replicating village, we are talking millions of tonnes as a probably great underestimate. Far beyond what we could ever hope to launch from earth.

Machines are not plants and there are no “seeds” that can grow into machines. One needs a massive network of machines to make more machines. Worse, machines in modern global industry are designed with the highest division of labor in mind. The more high-tech a machine is the more likely this is to be true, and the most extreme form is in the machines we currently send into space. Their parts depend for their origin and assembly on mines, factories, and transportation systems massing in the trillions of tonnes. Machines needed to be self-sufficient on a frontier would be of a radically different design, based on radically different design paradigms, than those known to today’s engineers in any engineering discipline.

The most minimal in this regard were the Polynesians, who could take everything with with them on a canoe. They did this by relying on biology and a few common rocks for everything in their lives, including their housing and transportation. They could take their entire society on their canoes in the form of just seeds, roots, piglets, and themselves. One cannot do anything like this for space industry, although of course science fiction is full of wish-fulfillment fantasies, like “nanobots”, that are said to be able to do so.

I wrote: mining machinery crunches massive solids every day with high mass thruput ratios.

Monte: Indeed it does: with (as you note) massive components and abundant power, both of which are gonna co$t at a lunar, Martian, or asteroidal site.

It will be a challenge to miniaturize, automate, and provide power without substantially reducing the MTR, to be sure. But the point of MTR is that one can amplify one kilogram of equipment launched out of earth’s deep gravity well into hundreds or thousands of kilograms of materials useful for a variety of things. That’s orders-of-magnitude improvements of the kind we have not gotten from aerospace engineering despite tens of billions of dollars of R&D. The high MTRs of many earthside processes demonstrate the many possibilities in this regard. There is nothing inherently difficult about mining and processing materials in space, it just hasn’t been tried yet, nor is it yet a serious academic discipline, and it’s very unfamiliar territory for the aerospace engineers who populate NASA and other parts of the space community.

We’ve been beating our heads against the wall for decades trying to bring launch costs down and in other ways trying to improve space economics through aerospace engineering. For those of us who are seriously interested in long-range thinking, rather than NASA’s pretense of same while dreaming of recreating a 40-year-old project, it’s time to try something different. ISRU can bring many orders-of-magnitude improvements. It’s where the action is space will be, and that makes the current vanguard of its development, the undersea ROV and robot technology, the place to be now for making real hardware that solves economically real problems and gives us the technology to build an actual spacefaring civilization, instead of a mere handful of wildly expensive space excursions, in the future.

Indeed it does: with (as you note) massive components and abundant power, both of which are gonna co$t at a lunar, Martian, or asteroidal site.

I take your point on marine ROV operations. I hope you’ll take mine, from someone who 35 years ago was covering the breathless stories about fortunes to be made from ocean-bottom manganese nodules… and expects to wait at least that long before the bonanza in methane hydrates. NB that we’re much farther ahead in getting at that nice fluid-phase oil and gas…

So much of the technology for automated and reliable mining is being developed, just not by NASA or anybody else in the space community.

I consider that a good thing — and have argued for a long time that NASA should concentrate on technologies specific to space, and adapt off-the-shelf robotics etc., rather than spread itself thin in an effort to be an all-purpose “futures” shop.

This depends on the mass throuput ratio, which can vary by thousands depending on the material being extracted and processed and the technology (reflecting the mining and chemical and mechanical engineering expertise) with which it is extracted. That opportunity to improve costs by orders of magnitude, by choice or discovery of target bodies and materials as well as by new technology, is not available with aerospace engineering as it is with ISRU.

should not generalize that gas/fluid-phase engineering — where the atmosphere keeps delivering your feedstock to the intakes, and the only moving parts are valves and impellers — to anything that involves processing crunchy, massive solids. The latter is a whole ‘nother class of engineering in terms of equipment mass (see above) and trouble-proneness (see below).

The biggest difference is in terms of expertise. Being gas phase, with the only moving parts being valves and impellers, it bears some resemblance to the combustion engines and life support systems with which many aerospace engineers are familiar. The processing of “crunchy, massive solid” materials is by contrast quite alien to the working space community.

But in fact mining machinery crunches massive solids every day with high mass thruput ratios. The MTR of a gravel quarry, for example, can be thousands per year, and coal and many other mines also have high outputs of mass processed per mass of equipment. It will be a challenge to miniaturize and automate such operations and keep the high MTR, of course.

The idea that a few astronauts are going to unfold some ultra-lightweight equipment that will then do its thing, gathering and chewing up tons of regolith 24/7 for long periods unattended, is…. uhh…. speculative.

I agree, but there’s nothing for it but to start trying it, on a very small scale and without the astronauts at first to be sure. I’d also suggest that robust equipment usually has a higher MTR than the ultra-lightweight structures most readily thought of by aerospace engineers. What we want for ISRU is small and robust. We can, though, use expensive materials that many mining engineers only dream of, for example we can make copious use of diamonds far harder than any rock they will encounter.

Meanwhile, ROVs are being deployed by the hundreds in the offshore oil industry to dig trenches on the ocean floor, and plans are afoot to use ROVs to dig, grind, mix, and pump gold, copper, and other ores from the ocean floor to waiting ships. Most of the earth’s surface, and thus most of its minerals, lies under the oceans still waiting to be tapped. So much of the technology for automated and reliable mining is being developed, just not by NASA or anybody else in the space community.