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Making the MMOST of ISRU for the Moon and Mars

Conceptual illustration of the Lunar OXygen In-situ Experiment (LOXIE) Production Prototype. Credits: Mark Berggren / Pioneer Astronautics

Here’s a novel way to produce both oxygen and steel in situ on the Moon and eventually on Mars. Under a NASA SBIR Phase II Sequential Contract, Pioneer Astronautics along with team members Honeybee Robotics and the Colorado School of Mines are developing what they call Moon to Mars Oxygen and Steel Technology (MMOST), an integrated system to produce metallic iron/steel and oxygen from processed lunar regolith.

In a presentation at a meeting of the Lunar Surface Innovation Consortium last month, Mark Berggren of Pioneer Astronautics gave an update on the team’s efforts. Progress has been made on several key processes under development as part of the overall manufacturing flow. Output products will include oxygen for either life support or rocket fuel oxidizer and metallic iron for additive manufacturing of lunar steel components.

MMOST process flow diagram. Credits: Mark Berggren / Pioneer Astronautics

The immediate next steps for the MMOST development program will be continual refinement of each process module, protocols for minimization of power requirements, demonstration of LOXIE in a vacuum environment and then optimization of mass, volume and power specifications for a scaled-up system toward flight readiness hardware.

Potential follow-on activities may include a robotic sub-scale LOXIE lunar flight experiment that could be sent to the Moon via a Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) lander. As part of the Artemis program crews could possibly demonstrate a pilot unit to validate manufacturing in the lunar environment. If successful, a full scale MMOST commercial system could come next in support of lunar base operations as part of a cis-lunar economy.

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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.

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Project MOONRISE demonstrates 3D printed regolith structures under lunar gravity conditions

Artist impression of the MOONRISE laser mounted on a lunar rover for fabrication of structures on the Moon. Credits: Laser Zentrum Hannover / 3D Printing Industry

A German company called Laser Zentrum Hannover .eV in partnership with the Technical University of Braunschweig has been working on a project called MOONRISE which aims to use laser technology to build a village on the Moon out of lunar regolith. Toward that end, the team for the first time has demonstrated the ability to 3D print structures out of simulated lunar regolith under lunar gravity conditions. The results of their experiments are described in an article in 3D Printing Industry.

The research was carried out in the Leibniz University Hannover’s Einstein-Elevator, a large-scale drop tower device in which experiments can be run under variable gravity conditions at a high repetition rate.

Initiated in 2019, Project MOONRISE is funded by the Volkswagen Foundation and is focused on improving the technology readiness level of additive manufacturing using lunar regolith as building material.

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Making oxygen from moondust with ROXY (and improving life on Earth)

Artist’s rendition of Airbus lunar lander with ROXY on board. Credits: Airbus

In a breakthrough experiment last month, a team led by Airbus Defence and Space (Friedrichshafen, Germany) has for the first time produced oxygen and other metals from simulated lunar soil with a proprietary process called Regolith to OXYgen and Metals Conversion, or ROXY. The revolutionary new process could be the core of an ISRU value chain on the moon, providing oxygen for habitats or rocket fuel, with added byproducts of metals and alloys as feedstock for additive manufacturing of building materials. This would significantly reduce the cost of settlements on the Moon as the construction materials could be fabricated in situ, without the need to be brought from Earth. Check out Airbus’ animation of ROXY here.

Airbus thinks that the ROXY reactor could have beneficial environmentally friendly applications on Earth as well:

“On Earth, ROXY opens a new pathway to drastically reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases that result from production of metals.” Since the process is essentially free of emissions “…these environmental impacts could be reduced, providing a significant contribution to the UN sustainability goals – another example of how space technologies can improve life on Earth”

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Intuitive Machine’s PRIME-1 ice mining drill to be delivered to the Moon by 2022

Illustration of Intuitive Machines’ Lunar Lander. Credits: Intuitive Machines

As part of the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative, NASA has selected Intuitive Machines to deliver ice harvesting equipment called Polar Resources Ice Mining Experiment (PRIME-1) to the Moon’s south pole. In a press release from yesterday, Intuitive stated that the instrument package includes a drill to excavate ice ladened regolith and a mass spectrometer to characterize the volatiles, the data from which will be used by the VIPER mission to follow shortly thereafter. Knowing how much water is available and how accessible it is will inform subsequent in situ resource utilization efforts needed for sustainable human outposts planned for later this decade.

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Spinning fiber from lunar regolith

A European student team call Ampex 20 is working on a project called MoonFiber which aims to automate production of glass fibers on the Moon. Applications include fabrication of composites, thermal insulation, fabrics and other products requiring woven material. Products made in-situ from local materials significantly reduce costs by not having to transport them from Earth.

Spinning unit capable to withstand the Moon environmental conditions. Image credit: Ampex 20

The MoonFiber project is being conducted by RWTH Aachen University in Germany. A teaser video is available here.

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Resilient ExtraTerrestrial Habitats

Shirley Dyke, Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Civil Engineering at Purdue University is the head of the school’s RETH (Resilient ExtraTerrestrial Habitats) Institute. Her work seeks an understanding of what characteristics make habitats safe through “cyber physical testing”, a discipline that combines computer models with physical testing to validate results. A habitat’s resilience level is paramount to this endeavor, which results in intelligently designed structures that mitigate risks of numerous hazards to humans anticipated in the lunar environment. Her team models the effects of meteoroid impacts, moon quakes, problems with lunar regolith (which is highly abrasive) and others that may impact the performance of outposts on the Moon.

Credits: Purdue University photo illustration/Mark Simons
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Breakthrough mission architecture for mining lunar polar ice

Joel Sercel of Trans Astronautica Corporation was recently awarded a Phase II NIAC grant for a Lunar Polar Mining Outpost (LPMO) that promises to greatly reduce the cost of commercializing propellant production on the Moon. The system utilizes two patented innovative concepts for generating power and processing regolith. The first invention is a several meters tall solar reflector tower called a Sun Flower™ to gather sunlight at the permanently illuminated areas near the poles and reflect it down to megawatt level solar arrays near the outpost. The second concept called Radiant Gas Dynamic (RGD) mining combines microwave and infrared radiation to sublimate ice out from the regolith for storage in cryotraps on electric powered rovers. The outpost elements are designed to be delivered to the lunar surface using Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket and Blue Moon lander.

Sercel states that “…LGMO promises to vastly reduce the cost of establishing and maintaining a sizable lunar polar outpost that can serve first as a field station for NASA astronauts exploring the Moon, and then as the beachhead for American lunar industrialization, starting with fulfilling commercial plans for a lunar hotel for tourists”

Diagram of Lunar Polar Propellant Mining Outpost (LPMO) concept
Credits: Joel Sercel
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Easy extraction of lunar water with Aqua Factorem

Philip Metzger of the University of Central Florida (UCF) has just been awarded a Phase I NIAC grant to investigate an innovative water harvesting process that will be cheaper then conventional methods.

“This simple architecture requires the minimum number of in-space elements, and notably does not require an in-space propellant depot, so it provides the lowest cost and lowest risk startup for a commercial operation. The study will also test the innovative Aqua Factorem process through laboratory experiments, and this will produce basic insights into the handling of lunar resources”

Revised 6 May 2020: UCF/Today has an update on this story.

An illustration of what the UCF developed process could look like on the moon. Credit: NASA and Jessica Woodward/UCF
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ESA laying plans for lunar resource prospecting

The European Space Agency is developing a drill and analysis package called Prospect designed to extract water from lunar regolith. The miniature laboratory will fly to the Moon on Luna-27, a Russian spacecraft. Landing site selection is underway but no target date for the mission has been set.