How to make oxygen on the moon

[muriel_volestrangler]

Not a detailed scientific explanation, but an overview - including things like how the one sixth gravity affects how gases and liquids interact, so it's not straightforward:

Inside a giant sphere, the engineers pored over their equipment. Before them stood a silvery metal contraption swathed in colourful wires – a box that they hope will one day make oxygen on the moon.

Once the team vacated the sphere, the experiment began. The box-like machine was now ingesting small quantities of a dusty regolith – a mixture of dust and sharp grit with a chemical composition mimicking real lunar soil.

Soon, that regolith was gloop. A layer of it heated to temperatures above 1,650C. And, with the addition of some reactants, oxygen-containing molecules began to bubble out.

“We’ve tested everything we can on Earth now,” says Brant White, a program manager at Sierra Space, a private company. “The next step is going to the moon.”

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cd7nr8wv5r9o

I suppose you could put a one-sixth-gravity centrifuge in Earth orbit to test things.

[Irish_Dem]

1. Thank god the billionaires will be able to evacuate to the moon after they destroy earth.

They are so special and brilliant they have to save themselves.

[eppur_se_muova]

2. A shame science journos seem terrified of including details of things like chemistry and math ...

... because they know much of the American (and British??) public is hopelessly ignorant on those topics. MAYBE if they tried spreading some of that knowledge through their articles, the problem could be alleviated a bit ! Whatever happened to the noble calling of EXPLAINING the news to your readers ? Where is the editor calling to "put some flesh on those scrawny bones !"?

Here, they describe the process as a "carbothermal process" -- any chemist or metallurgist can guess what that implies, but most others can't -- and assure us "the carbon can be recycled", with no remote suggestion of how (will that require a wholly different technology?). Unless they're protecting a patentable process (and, to make allowances, they very well might be, which they could mention in the article), they should expound on these in more detail, limited attention spans (theirs or ours) be damned.