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| Defining the Lunar Industrial Seed: What Comes Before How? by David Dietzler 2009 Seed Products and Mass Production Given the high cost of space transportation it is necessary to minimize upported mass to save money and make a solar power satellite project economically feasible. The mass of the lunar industrial seed must be kept as low as is possible while still making it possible for the seed to mine, produce materials, self replicate and manufacture everything from bricks to mass drivers on the Moon. Before we can determine the components of the seed we must ask,"What are we going to make?" before we answer the question,"How are we going to make it?" We must design before we manufacture and we must design for manufacturing. In other words, we must design things that can be made simply and economically. If we are to grow a lunar industrial seed amassing from several hundred to several thousand tons into lunar industrial complexes amassing millions of tons we will have to engage in mass production. Standardization is one of the keys to mass production. We need to figure out, or somebody else does, how to make in no special order standardized lunar products such as: LOW TECH ITEMS a brick(interlocking?)-cast basalt, glass and ceramic from magma electrolysis a block-same materials as above and possibly from concrete also a slab-ditto a sewer pipe-ditto-this could also be used for air ducts a water pipe-ditto water faucets, etc. elbows and Ts for both pipes-ditto various tiles-ditto a steel rail a tie, unless we go with monorails various steel bolts, rolled threads then finished on laser lathes various nuts various iron plates an iron beam an iron stud a cement board and maybe a drywall section various gauges of aluminum wire with glass cloth insulation various electrical parts-a switch, connectors, junction box, etc. a door frame that can have either glass or metal plate in it a door knob a hinge a non-insulated water and sewage tank metal pipes for conveying high pressure gases a toilet a bath tub or shower stall a planting box-made of bricks or blocks i guess a sink various pieces of furniture made of CB, metal or AAC a glass fiber cloth sand bag for piling up regolith sand bags around modules for rad and therm protection. this bag could also be used for cement and groceries, etc a beer bottle that can also be filled with other beverages a half gallon milk bottle a canning jar that can double as a foodstuffs jar MORE COMPLEX ITEMS a silicon solar panel an airlock and hatches etc. various electric motors-these might be among the more complex lunar manufacturing jobs we must do. Mark R. has pointed out that large motors will need cooling systems a high pressure gas storage tank an insulated cryo liquid storage tank valves for hp gas pipes a heliostat a fiber optic bundle an electric stove a refrigerator a ventilation fan a cooling unit compressors? space radiators? a solar furnace, therefore a reflector system Vehicles-two-a van and a truck made by stretching the van and sticking 4 std wheels on the back end with std electromagnetic brakes and std motors in each wheel. Std batteries wired in paralell. see: http://www.moonminer.com/Lunar_Model_T.html Heavy equpiment- one volatiles harvestor model, one mining shovel model, one small crane model and one large crane model that can also become a drag line Standard vehicle and heavy equipment parts, frames, etc. will be necessary. This will get complicated. We will have to keep designs as simple as possible and leave out frills. machine tools-perhaps something like the Multi-Machine will be central to machining products on the Moon. see: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/multimachine a mass driver The list above is certainly incomplete. I welcome others to modify and add on to the list. Solar Wind Implanted Volatiles-Those Precious Light Elements Perhaps the first job to be tackled on the Moon will be mining for solar wind implanted volatiles-hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen and helium. These will be needed for life support and industrial processes. Mining robots will shovel up regolith, load it into onboard furnaces, and roast out the volatiles at about 700 C. Hydrogen will come off as is and some will react with oxygen in the silicates of the regolith to form H2O. Carbon will form CO, CO2 and CH4. Nitrogen is almost inert and will come of as is and so will helium, both helium 3 and normal helium 4. Hydrogen is needed for ilmenite reduction and CO and CO2 will be reacted with H2 over a nickel catalyst to form CH4 that can be decomposed with heat at about 900 C. to yield carbon and recover hydrogen. Carbon will be needed for steel and for carbonyls of iron and nickel for chemical vapor deposition processes. Nitrogen will have uses for CELSS. Helium can be used as an inert gas for work chambers where vacuum and oxidiation are undesirable and as a rocket fuel tank pressurant. Storage and processing systems for these gases and water must be upported. Hydrogen can be stored in solid media and room temperature. Carbon monoxide, dioxide, methane and nitrogen can be liquefied with pressure and cooling. Helium must be cooled to near absolute zero so this element must be stored in high pressure gas tanks since it might not be practical to upport heavy multistage cooling equipment, however, if the helium is piped through shielded space radiators exposed only to the ten degrees Kelvin temperature of outer space, it might be possible to liquefy helium on the Moon without excessively heavy machines. The Mark 3 miner designed at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, is projected to amass ten tons and could produce over 200 tons of hydrogen, 16.5 tons of nitrogen, 82 tons of carbon and about 100 tons of helium every year. That's an incredible bounty from a ten ton machine, not counting the solar power systems needed to energize the machine, when it will cost thousands of dollars per pound of mass sent to the Moon. One of my associates has calculated that with the Apollo system it cost $30,000 to send a pound to the Moon. If the cost of upports drops to say $10,000 a pound with the success of rockets like the Space X Falcon 9 then we would still pay $4 billion to send 200 tons of H2 to the Moon. The value of mining for solar wind implanted volatiles on the Moon is clear. That Essential Oxygen Oxygen is necessary for breathing and producing water, but also for rockets. A reusable robotic Moon Shuttle might tank up with LOX on the lunar surface and rendesvouz with spacecraft arriving in LLO with just enough fuel for landing on the Moon. The Moon Shuttle carrying enough LOX for descent will dock with the cargo craft and take on fuel then descend to the lunar surface. This system will increase the amount of cargo that would otherwise consist of oxidizer upported from Earth to the Moon and reduce costs. If the system is reliable enough it could be used to land humans on the Moon too and supply LOX for return to Earth. Fuel for the Moon Shuttle's ascent would have to be produced on the Moon. If one Mark 3 miner can produce 200+ tons of hydrogen a year, a small fleet of them could produce enough H2 for fueling Moon Shuttles as well as other purposes. It might be possible to stretch the hydrogen supply by combining it with lunar silicon to produce silane-SiH4. Not only must we produce oxygen, but also storage tanks, piping systems, pumps and space radiators to liquefy oxygen. We will need a system for producing oxygen, probably molten silicate electrolysis or vapor pyrolysis. These systems could also produce silicon for making silane. We will need aluminum for electrical cables and aluminum or steel for LOX storage tanks, pipes, pumps and radiators. Lander tanks might be used for the first LOX storage tanks. To make more tanks and accessories we will need to produce metals. The first metal to be produced on the Moon might be iron from magnetically extracted iron fines of meteoric origin that compose up to 0.5% of the regolith. This iron might be combined with some upported or Moon mined carbon by using the old blister steel or cementation process to convert it to stronger steel. see: http://www.moonminer.com/blister-steel.html LOX storage tanks, piping, radiators etc. might be made by depositing carbonyl iron vapors on mandrels heated to a few hundred degrees Celsius. The carbonyls would be formed by reacting iron fines with hot high pressure carbon monoxide gas made from upported carbon and lunar oxygen. The work would be done in inert gas filled inflatable chambers so that when the carbonyls decompose and leave a steel coating on the hot mandrels the CO or CO2 that is released can be captured by air scrubbers to recycle the precious carbon. Galactic Mining Industries Inc. has done lots of work on this technology. See: http://www.space-mining.com/ Iron fines that are 5% nickel and 0.2% cobalt when subjected to hot high pressure CO gas form carbonyls that can be vaporized and distilled to separate them at moderate temperatures. Nickel can be used as a catalyst and to strengthen iron and steel. Cobalt can be used for tough cobalt steel drill bits and we might be doing some extreme drilling jobs on the Moon. It can also be used to stain glass. Just ten pounds of cobalt can stain a ton of glass deep blue. This would add color to the drab Moon where psychological survival is as important as physical survival. Solar Panels Needed Early Initially, mining robots and oxygen production equipment powered by solar panels will be landed on the Moon. More of these will have to be produced to replicate and grow the seed. Solar panels will require silicon, aluminum, phosphorus and glass. Some boron for doping p-type silicon and some phosphorus for n-type material could be upported and combined with silicon produced on the Moon to make more solar panels to power more equipment as needed. Eventually we will have to produce aluminum on the Moon to make p-type silicon and produce phosphorus too, so we will need devices for producing Al and P on the Moon as well as devices for producing silicon. Many proposals for extracting metals on the Moon have been made and I will not elaborate on that now. We will also need devices for rolling aluminum slabs or ingots into sheets for the solar panel backing, extrude them into wires and devices for producing aluminum mesh for the top electrode to make solar panels. Robots to assemble the solar panels, deploy them and wire them up will also be necessary. All expansion of the lunar industrial seed will depend on electricity so it will be necessary to produce solar panels in large numbers before anything else except for volatiles mining, oxygen and things related to oxygen production and storage. Basic Bricks Brick making will be essential. I envison solar or electric furnaces loaded with regolith and molten regolith pouring out into simple sand molds dug in the lunar surface to cast bricks, blocks and slabs. Hopefully, the molten material will cool off and solidify before too much evaporation into the vacuum occurs. Many different kinds of molten silicate electrolysis furnaces, solar and/or electric furnaces for melting and casting metals, and retorts for thermal metal extraction processes will be composed mostly of high temperature bricks that are welded together with microwaves or electron beams. Bricks will also be needed for retaining walls that hold up regolith over buried modules. Slabs will be needed for short roads that robots can roll over without kicking up dust near the equipment. Cast basalt or pressed and sintered basalt possibly with metallic reinforcements will be used to make bricks and slabs. Molten silicate electrolysis also produces a spinel and silicate rich ceramic in addition to iron, silicon and oxygen with impurities most probably sodium, potassium and phosphorus that could be condensed from the oxygen.* The ceramic will melt at around 1500 C. and might be very useful. See: http://www.moonminer.com/Moon-bricks.html and http://www.moonminer.com/Magma-process.html Spinning Metals Steel, aluminum, almost any ductile metal, can be spun. A metal disk is placed on a rotating lathe and formed against a mandrel into a lamp vase, bell, pot, pan, wok, musical drum, even CO2 cartridges and high pressure gas tanks. HP gas tanks will be needed for spacesuits, life support systems, and welding gas tanks. CO2 cartridges might be used for dart guns used by security guards to subdue troublesome characters. Magnesium is not very ductile so it probably can't be spun. A metal spinning lathe and upported or Moon made mandrels will be useful on the Moon. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_spinning and http://www.terrytynan.com/metalspinning.html Extrusions Extruders will be part of the lunar industrial seed. Rods, bars, rails, wires and pipes can be made by extrusion. Rods can be used for axels, bars for vehicle frames, rails for railways, wires and pipes for obvious uses. Lunar extruders will not use hydraulics. Their rams will be powered by electric motors and large screws or augers. It should also be possile to extrude hot soft glass or basalt into fibers for use as sound deadener, thermal insulation, and glass cloth. Special looms and sewing machines will be needed to make glass cloth items. Glass cloth will not be used for clothing because it is abrasive (although it might be coated with plastic-see: http://www.asi.org/adb/02/16/01/01/glass-fiber-textiles.html) but it could be used for tents that protect equipment from the heat of mid-day, spacesuit outerwear, curtains, drapes, rugs, mildew resistant wallboard, insulation for electrical wires and runners that lunar workers can walk across out-vac without kicking up lots of Moon dust. It might also be possible to use glass cloth sealed with silicones to make inflatables on the Moon. Blacksmithing This ancient art might find use on the Moon. Lunan blacksmiths with electric forges and power hammers could make all sorts of things including tools, hinges, pins, bolts and ornate metal work from iron and steel. We won't be able to do much without steel tools and ornate iron work will help with psychological survival. Cement This material can be made in solar or electric furnaces by roasting highland regolith as described by Dr. T. D. Lin. It will be needed for floors in chambers where molten metals are handled and cement or concrete cylinders several feet thick could be used for habitat modules. The lunar industrial seed must include solar or electric furnaces for cement making, sealed cement mixers and hoses, inflatables for working with cement in which we can recapture water vapor from drying cement items, and fuel cells for combining oxygen and hydrogen to make water as well as electricity. Some CaSO4 made on the Moon can be used to retard cement setting time. See the next section for more on that. More Advanced Operations Electric furnaces will also require cables, switches, possibly microwave generators, electrodes and other parts. Cables and wires can be made by extrusion. Switches and other electrical parts might use cast basalt or glass insulating parts. The parts might be made by casting in titanium molds. Basalt is easily obtained just by melting mare regolith. Glass might be produced by roasting regolith at 1500 C. It can also be obtained by sulfuric acid leaching of regolith. Sulfuric acid might be obtained by electrostatic separation of troilite, FeS, from regolith, decomposing it with heat in a stream of oxygen to obtain sulfur dioxide that is then reacted with more oxygen and an upported vanadium pentoxide catalyst or just plain regolith which has catalytic properties to get sulfur trioxide then mixing the SO3 with water. Water would be obtained by combining upported or Moon mined hydrogen with oxygen produced on the Moon. Eventually substantial amounts of hydrogen and water could be obtained by mining and roasting millions of tons of regolith on the smooth mare (carbon, nitrogen and helium will also be obtained). Basalt will resist 98% sulfuric acid solutions so it could be used to make leaching vats consisting of e-beam or microwave welded basalt bricks. Silica for glass and calcium sulfate (plaster) will precipitate from a water solution of metallic salts formed when leaching regolith with H2SO4. Silica and CaSO4 could be separated electrostatically. The plaster could be used to make molds for casting aluminum and magnesium. Aluminum will be desirable for conducting components of electrical parts like switches. Titanium molds for casting glass and basalt parts could be made by 3D laser or electron beam sintering guided by computers. Since titanium melts at 1800 C. it can handle molten silica (m.p. 1700 C) and lunar basalt (m.p. 1500 C). Titanium would be obtained by electrostatic separation of ilmenite from mare soil, reduction with hydrogen to get particles of TiO2 and iron, roasting off the iron in the vacuum at about 1200 C. and deoxidizing the TiO2 to titanium sponge in upported FFC cells. The titanium would then be ground to a powder or melted and sprayed thru a nozzle to form a fine mist of droplets that cool by radiation to get a powder. The Ti powder would then be formed into parts and molds by 3D sintering. Titanium might be used for conducting components in some electrical parts too. Although it is not nearly as good a conductor as aluminum it has a much higher melting point and short thick sections of Ti in switches for instance won't offer a lot of resistance. Silica extracted by H2SO4 leaching is glass in its simplest formulation. It could be used to make glass fiber reinforced glass composites, also know as glass-glass composites or GLAX. This material has a low coefficient of thermal expansion and has high tensile strength. Fibers could be made by extrusion. These fibers could also be used for fiber optic telecommunication cables on the Moon. Translucent GLAX could be used to make hangars for mining and other machines during the intense heat of day. Should acid leaching not be capable of supplying the demand for this material, deposits of native lunar volcanic glass might be mined. Glass will also have mundane uses like windows, tableware, bottles, and laboratory ware. Glass fibers could even be woven into fabrics. Wetted plaster laid between two sheets of glass cloth can make wallboard that resists rot and mildew. Drywall might be used in habitat. Glass has other more exotic uses. Tubes filled with CO2 and rods doped with neodyminum from KREEP could be used for lasers. Quartz is basically pure silica and it can be used for high temperature windows in solar furnaces. Glass extraction and mining equipment as well as glass working equipment should be part of the lunar industrial seed. 3D sintering, also called laser stereolithography has been used extensively with plastics. It is also possible to use this process to form items made of steel, aluminum and titanium. If it becomes possible to use 3D sintering with iron and magnesium we will be in luck. If this is not possible, uppported plastic powders could be formed by 3D sintering into forms pressed into plaster to make molds. The plastic forms could be ground up into a powder and reused to make more forms for new plaster molds for casting magnesium and aluminum. The plastic forms could also be used to make sand molds for casting iron, if we can make a decent sand mold with regolith. Regolith is like a very fine sand, but it is not like clay used to make sand molds. We must experiment with wetted regolith to see if it can be used to make sand molds. We must also look at the use of sodium silicate, an inorganic adhesive that can be made on the Moon from SiO2 and Na2O that is also used as a sand mold binder. Also, we must consider sintered regolith molds. While 3D sintering looks like the key to almost magical "Santa Claus machines" it might also prove that casting steel, aluminum, titanium, iron and magnesium parts is cheaper and quicker than using 3D sintering exclusively. Laser machining devices guided by computers would make the final cuts on the cast parts and drill holes in them. Robot arms would then assemble the parts. To make plaster molds and sand molds, inflatable Kevlar work chambers filled with an inert gas will be needed. As the wetted plaster or sand dries precious water vapor will be recovered by dehumidifiers. The inflatable chambers will have concrete floors in case molten metal is spilled. Solar or electric furnaces to roast CaO and Al2O3 rich highland regolith into cement will be called for. The cement powder will be mixed with water in airtight devices and the wet cement will be pumped thru hoses into the chambers where it dries and the water vapor is recovered. Casting robots must work in pressurized chambers to prevent evaporation of molten metals in the vacuum also during casting operations. see: http://www.moonminer.com/Casting_Chambers.html Robots Beyond oxygen and associated liquifying and storage gear, metals, solar panels, electrical parts, more furnaces and more parts for furnaces like bricks and slabs, we will need to make more mining and manufacturing robots. This will be very complex. Small titanium parts for robots could be made by 3D sintering. Massive, unitary and simple parts could be made by casting and laser machining. Complex, lightweight and electronic parts for robots could be upported from Earth. Robots must be capable of welding as well as assembly. Most welding will be done by simple electric arc welding with steel rod electrodes that won't need shielding in the vacuum. High voltage DC power sources will be needed, so DC from solar panels might be inverted to AC, stepped up in transformers and rectified back to DC with upported solid state devices. Electric motors will be needed in large numbers and in a variety of sizes to drive pumps and compressors, and to provide motion for robots and vehicles. Cast iron or steel parts and aluminum wires will be the primary components of electric motors. This will not be simple and the equipment sent to the Moon to make electric motors will be essential for industrial seed growth. Motor winding machines will be part of this. Power hammers to knock out motor housings from plates of iron or steel will probably be needed too. Small motor parts might be made of 3D sintered titanium. Some silicone or vacuum grease might be upported to lubricate the motors' bearings. Concluding Remarks At this point, we can list these things to be produced on the Moon: LOX, iron, steel, storage tanks, piping, pumps, radiators, solar panels and their components of silicon, aluminum, phosphorus and glass, wires, cables, electrical parts like switches, bricks, slabs, furnaces and roads of bricks and slabs, sulfuric acid, leaching vats, plaster, titanium, molds, cement, water, electric motors, robot parts and robots. The equipment needed to do this includes: Molten silicate electrolysis or vapor pyrolysis devices, solar panels, wiring/cabling, electrical parts (switches, transformers, solid state invertors and rectifiers), an aluminum rolling mill, extruders (for metal bars, rods, cables and wires and glass fibers); glass working equipment, electric arc welding devices, carbonyl vapor deposition systems, inflatable work chambers, furnaces for making cement, sulfuric acid making systems, electrostatic separators, metal extraction equipment for silicon, Al, Fe, Ti, Mg, furnaces for carburizing iron to steel, brick and slab making systems, electric motor making systems, grinders, 3D sintering systems, laser machining and drilling devices, and robots for mining, assembly and welding.** Also some carbon, hydrogen and argon to fill the casting chambers. That's a start. I have no idea what the mass of this will be. That will depend on how small engineers think the seed can be and how fast and how large it can grow. There are sure to be many things I have not thought of or chosen not to discuss in this article for the sake of brevity. As the number or mining and manufacturing robots grows, along with oxygen, metal and solar panel production, larger and larger machines will be built to make larger and larger parts for things like human habitat modules, pressurized vehicle cabins, and mass drivers. Also, larger and larger mining robots will be built to mine vast amounts of regolith to supply the solar power satellite builders. The process will probably be slow at first and mistakes will be made and corrected. Fortunately the Moon is only three days away, unlike distant Mars, and it won't take a long time to correct mistakes by rocketing up some extra equipment. There will probably be humans supervising the robots and doing fine tasks by hand that are beyond the abilities of the robots. Humans on the Moon could fix mistakes shortly after they occur. Progress will then accelerate after the learning phase as the lunar industrial seed grows exponentially. *Phosphorus is needed for n-type solar panel material. Along with potassium it is one of the three major fertilizer ingredients with nitrogen being the third. Potassium and sodium can be reacted with water to make potassium hydroxide and sodium hydroxide-caustics for soap making by mixing them with vegetable and/or animal fats. Soap will be an essential for humans on the Moon. Sodium is needed to make table salt, another essential for humans, and sodium hydroxide reacted with silica can make sodium silicate, an inorganic adhesive with many uses. ** Mining robots will consist of robots with onboard furnaces for roasting out solar wind implanted volatiles-hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen and helium. There will also be robots with magnetic separators for extracting iron fines of meteoric origin that compose 0.15% to 0.5% of the regolith. Other robots will simply excavate regolith that has been gone over for volatiles and iron fines and load it in devices that extract oxygen, silicon and metals. |