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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
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Where should we get oxygen on the Moon?

Artist impression of activities at a Moon Base which could include oxygen production. Credits: ESA – P. Carril

Kevin Cannon of the Cannon Group at the Colorado School of Mines can help find the answer. In a recent post on his Planetary Intelligence blog, the Assistant Professor of Geology and Geological Engineering describes a trade study comparing extraction of oxygen from regolith such as Metalysis’ ESA funded study to getting O2 from ice mining at the lunar poles as favored by NASA. Nothing stands out from a cursory look at the pros and cons of each approach.

In a more data driven analysis to compare apples to apples, Cannon examines energy costs of mining oxygen and plots it against the amount of bulk material that has to be processed to produce an equal amount of O2 from different sources ranging from plain silicate regolith to various grades of water ice endmembers. The analysis even includes processing material from various types of asteroid resources. The types of ice/regolith mixtures can vary widely as described in one of Cannon’s tweets.

Artist’s impression of different types of water ice / regolith endmembers. Credits: Lena Jakaite / strike-dip.com / Colorado School of Mines

Cannon’s analysis reaches the conclusion that “At 1.5-2% water by weight, icy regolith is essentially on par with O2-from-regolith on a joule for joule basis. In other words, if you had a pile of icy regolith already sitting on the surface, it makes sense to throw it out if the grade is less than about 1.5% and extract oxygen directly from the silicate regolith instead.”

More brilliance from the mind of Kevin Cannon can be found in these posts: Want to eat like a Martian in an environmentally friendly manner?, The logistics of dining off Earth, SpaceX will need suppliers for Mars settlement, The accessibility of lunar ice. And of course, don’t forget to visit kevincannon.rocks.