Posted on

Redwire wins first place in NASA’s Breaking the Ice Lunar Challenge

Image of Lunar Transporter (L-Tran) with Lunar Regolith Excavator (L-Rex) stored on board as they roll down a ramp from a lunar lander. Credits: screen capture from Redwire Space animation. All images below are so credited.

NASA has just announced the winners of the Breaking the Ice Lunar Challenge, an incentive program for companies to investigate new approaches to ISRU for excavating icy regolith from the Moon’s polar regions. The agency will be awarding half a million dollars in cash prizes and Redwire Space headquartered in Jacksonville, Florida won first prize scoring $125,000 for its elegantly designed two rover lunar excavation system. The criteria used by NASA to select the winners was based on maximum water delivery, minimum energy use, and lowest-mass equipment.

Upon delivery by a lunar lander near a shadowed crater in the Moon’s south polar region, a multipurpose Lunar Transporter (L-Tran) carrying a Lunar Regolith Excavator (L-Rex) rolls down a ramp to begin operations on the surface. The rover transports the excavator to the target area where icy regolith has been discovered.

Image of L-Rex driving off of L-Tran

The L-Rex then drives off the L-Tran to start collecting regolith in rotating cylindrical drums on the front and back of the vehicle.

L-Rex collecting lunar regolith in fore and aft collection drums
L-Rex loading regolith into L-Tran for transport back to processing station

When the drums are full, L-Rex returns to the rover and deposits its load in L-Tran’s storage bed. L-Rex repeats this process over many trips until L-Tran is loaded to capacity at which point the rover returns to a processing facility to separate the water from the regolith.

L-Tran dumping a load of regolith into a hopper at a processing facility
After regolith beneficiation the separated frozen water ice is loaded into L-Tran for transport to secondary processing plant

Upon separation into purified frozen ice, L-Tran is once again loaded up with the product for transport to a station for storage or perhaps, further processing. No further details were provided but the final process is presumed to be electrolysis of the water into useful end products such as H2 and O2 for rocket fuel or life support uses, plus simply storage as drinking water for human habitation.

L-Tran loading water ice into hopper for final processing into end products or simply storage

The second place prize of $75,000 was awarded to the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, Colorado for its Lunar Ice Digging System (LIDs). The LIDS proposal has three rovers – an excavator, regolith hauler, and water hauler each of which would be teleoperated from a nearby lunar surface habitat.

Austere Engineering of Littleton, Colorado won the $50,000 third place prize for its Grading and Rotating for Water Located in Excavated Regolith (GROWLER) system. The system weighs slightly more then a school bus tipping the scales at an estimated mass of 12 metric tons.

A second phase of the challenge, if approved, could move the proposals into hardware development and a future demonstration mission toward eventual support of lunar habitats and a cislunar economy.

Checkout Redwire’s animation of their lunar excavation system:

Animation from Redwire Space’s Breaking the Ice Lunar Challenge proposal. Credits: Redwire Space
Posted on

Masten’s Rocket Mining System

Artist depiction of a lander descending to the lunar surface carrying a rover housing Masten’s Rocket Mining System. Credits: Masten Space Systems

Called RocketM for Resource Ore Concentrator using Kinetic Energy Targeted Mining, Masten Space Systems has partnered with Honeybee Robotics and Lunar Outpost to design a novel system for blasting ice out of lunar regolith for ISRU under NASA’s Break the Ice Lunar Challenge program.

Lunar Outpost rover decending to the lunar surface down a ramp deployed off a Masten lander. Credits: Masten Space Systems

RocketM equipment would be housed aboard a Lunar Outpost rover delivered to lunar surface via Masten’s lunar lander. After unloading, the rover would be robotically navigated by a geologic team to an excavation site in the Aitken Basin near the Moon’s south pole. Upon arrival over the target area, the RocketM dome is extended down to the surface to create a seal over the regolith. A rocket is then ignited in a series of 1/2 second pulses fluidizing the regolith into icy grains which are conveyed out of the dome via a Honeybee Robotics PlanetVac pneumatic sampling system for processing. Beneficiation of the particles is accomplished using an Aqua Factorem process for separation into purified ice and other useful components. Aqua Factorem has been covered by SSP in a previous post. The whole process would only take 5-10 minutes.

A view of the inner workings of RocketM showing a centrally located pressure dome extending down to form a seal on the lunar surface. Credits: Masten Space Systems
Cutaway view showing a 100lb thrust rocket engine firing half-second bursts to heat the regolith to a depth of 2 meters releasing icy grains for processing to extract water. Credits: Masten Space Systems.

The stored water can subsequently be electrolyzed using solar energy into hydrogen and oxygen for lunar operations. What is so exciting about this ISRU system is that the rocket engine can be refueled by the mined products enabling an estimated useful life of 5 years.

Masten has tested the system using simulated lunar regolith providing groundwork toward optimizing conditions within the pressure dome. Further testing is needed at the system level to validate flight readiness.

As stated on Masten’s blog: “Usable as drinking water, rocket fuel, and other vital resources, lunar ice extraction is critical to maintain a sustained presence on the Moon and allow future missions to Mars and beyond. It can also be used in conjunction with other volatiles found in lunar regolith, such as oxygen and methane, to support energy, construction, and manufacturing needs. There’s a lot of promise – water excavation is just step one!”

Watch Masten’s video describing the system.

Posted on

Lunar regolith beneficiation: a review of the latest research

Artist impression of a moon base. Credits: ESA

In the July Issue of Planetary and Space Science there is a summary of research on beneficiation, the process used for separation of minerals from waste in lunar regolith to prepare feedstock for chemical reactions to produce oxygen. One of the most commonly studied processes is hydrogen reduction of ilmenite (FeTiO3), a mineral abundant in the lunar maria. This type of research is critical to prepare for situ resource utilization (ISRU) needed for lunar settlements.

Benefication processes use differences in physical properties (e.g., density, electromagnetic characteristics) to manipulate materials, most commonly (especially on Earth) with water to facilitate separation. This is not practical in space environments where large scale water use will be more challenging then on Earth. On the Moon, dry techniques such as magnetic or electrostatic process are better suited to this application. The authors describe the physics behind the beneficiation process for ISRU in the lunar environment and survey the research performed thus far on these methods with interesting recommendations for further studies.