Metalysis, a Sheffield, England-based manufacturer of metal and alloy powders, has won a European Space Agency contract to develop a process to turn Moon dust into oxygen along with aluminum, iron and other metal powders that lunar colonists can use for construction, reports The Guardian.

Oxygen makes up about 45% of the molecular weight of rocks brought back from the Moon. The rest is mainly iron, aluminum and silicon. Earlier this year scientists at Metalysis and the University of Glasgow announced they could extract 95% of the oxygen from simulated lunar soil, leaving useful metal alloy powders behind.

The ESA contract will fund Metalysis for nine months to perfect an electrochemical process that extracts oxygen from dust and rocks by sending an electrical current through the material. The process is already in use in Earth, but oxygen is an unneeded byproduct. The story is quite different on the Moon, where oxygen is a major constituent of two extremely scarce commodities: breathable air and rocket fuel.

“Oxygen is useful not only for astronauts to breathe, but also as an oxidiser in rocket propulsion systems,” said Mark Symes, with the University of Glasgow. “There is no free oxygen on the moon, so astronauts would have to take all their own oxygen with them to the moon, for life support and to enable their return journey, and this adds considerably to the weight and hence expense of rocket launches bound for the moon.”

Bacon’s bottom line: The industrial-scale manufacture of oxygen and metals on the Moon will transform lunar economics by creating a virtually unlimited supply of the critical element. While this breakthrough will facilitate travel between the Moon and back, it is not enough by itself to support large-scale colonization there. Pure oxygen is poisonous to humans and must be diluted with other elements — most notably nitrogen in Earth’s atmosphere — to be breathable. Also, oxygen requires a supply of hydrogen with which to interact to function as a rocket fuel. Scientists and engineers will need to identify abundant sources of these elements in order to free the Moon from the immense expense of lifting materials out of Earth’s gravity well.

Scientists are increasingly confident that there is a significant amount of water on the Moon, but there is still uncertainty as to how much. Moon-orbiting satellites that rely upon ultraviolet, visible of near-infrared light to identify ice deposits can sense only a slice of the lunar surface measurable in a few millimeters.

“You really don’t know if it’s just a very thin frost or if it extends deeper,” says Kevin Cannon, a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Central Florida, who has written a paper for non-academics, “Ice Prospecting: Your Guide to Getting Rich on the Moon.” Orbiting instruments that potentially could detect ice deposits beneath the surface — such as radar and neutron spectroscopy — have much much lower spatial resolutions.”

To get better data, NASA has begun planning a mission to send a rover to the Moon with mining instruments, hopefully by late 2023. The golf cart-sized rover will survey and map ice deposits in the lunar south pole. One of the instruments is a one-meter drill called TRIDENT (The Regolith and Ice Drill for Exploring New Terrain), reports Air & Space. Building a drill capable of penetrating the Moon’s surface in subzero temperatures is fraught with challenges. Lunar regolith, highly impacted over billions of years of bombardments, is dense. Add ice, and the soil could be harder than concrete. more “Mining for Water on the Moon”

Water is essential to space exploration and colonization. Now that it has been demonstrated that billions of gallons of ice and molecular water are found on the Moon, the challenge is to figure out how to extract it.

In MIT Technology Review, space reporter Neel V. Patel lists the obstacles. Super-cold temperatures and radiation could endanger humans and degrade equipment. Lunar dust sticks to everything, wrecking machinery and posing safety issues to workers in spacesuits. And, of course, astronaut miners would have to be housed and supported on the Moon.

Lunar water comes in the form of tiny icy grained mixed with the soil, mostly in permanently shaded regions of craters in temperatures of 40 K (-233.15 °C). To be useful as a rocket fuel the material, only 5.6% water by weight, would require aggressive processing to rid contaminants.

One proposed method would be to build large towers with concave mirrors on the top that could reflect sunlight into the shadowed regions of lunar craters trapping the water. The energy would heat the lunar soil enough to get the ice to sublimate into vapor. A tent (transparent so the light could get through) would capture the vapor, which could be moved into units where it would freeze back into ice, and then purified at a separate location. Ultimately, the water would be separated into oxygen and hydrogen by electrolysis, and then liquified to the constituents used as rocket propellant.

Although humans have demonstrated the ability to operate rovers and landers that can withstand conditions on the Moon, no one knows if industrial infrastructure would hold up. Writes Patel: “It’s not easy to just wake a piece of technology from a 40 K slumber.” more “How to Extract Ice on the Moon”