Seven university teams were selected to develop concepts supporting metal production on the Moon in NASA’s 2023 annual Breakthrough, Innovative and Game-Changing (BIG) Idea Challenge: Lunar Forge.
The awards total about $1.1 million, with values between $120,000 and $180,000 based on each team’s proposed concept. The challenge is a unique collaboration between NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate’s (STMD) Game Changing Development (GCD) program and NASA’s Office of STEM Engagement Space Grant Project.
The 2023 BIG Idea Challenge provides undergraduate and graduate students up to $180,000 to design, develop, and demonstrate technologies that will enable the production of lunar infrastructure from ISRU-derived metals found on the Moon. Key infrastructure products desired are storage vessels for liquids and gases, extrusions, pipes, power cables, and supporting structures (i.e., roads, landing pads, etc.). Teams are invited to submit proposals that focus on any part of the metal product production pipeline* from prospecting to testing.
Each team will submit a detailed and realistic budget in their proposals, not to exceed $180K. A wide range of award sizes is expected (in the range of $50K to $180K), depending on the scope of the work proposed. NASA anticipates funding several larger-scope awards ($125 – $180K) and several smaller-scope awards ($50K – $124K).
When NASA returns to the Moon with the Artemis program, they plan to put in place sustainable infrastructure that will allow us to increase our exploration capabilities and pave the way for a sustainable human presence. Crews will stay on the surface and in lunar orbit for longer periods of time. Using in-situ resources (ISRU) is critical for supporting human activities on the moon due to the high cost of transporting materials from the Earth. Currently, a top priority for ISRU system development has been the extraction of oxygen, and other volatiles, since they are the easiest to extract and can be used as propellants and for life-support systems. The next priority is the extraction of metals which have many potential uses critical to the operation of a lunar base. These include pressure vessels, pipes, power cables, and supporting structures.
NASA’s Lunar Surface Innovation Initiative is working to develop and demonstrate technologies to use the Moon’s resources to produce water, fuel, and other supplies as well as capabilities to excavate and construct structures on the Moon. They need practical and affordable ways to use resources along the way, rather than carrying everything we think will be needed. Future astronauts will require the ability to collect space-based resources and transform them into the products needed for a sustained presence.
NASA is making long-term investments to advance ISRU technology in multiple areas such as oxygen extraction from regolith as well as regolith-based in-space manufacturing and construction. With the addition of ISRU-derived metals for pressure vessels, power cables, landing pads, rails for transportation, and pipes for the distribution of liquids and gases, most of the high mass products needed can be made locally. Advancements in additive manufacturing, or 3D printing, may make it possible to use metal feedstocks harvested on the Moon to fabricate a wide variety of complex products without complex casting, forging, milling, and machining. Feedstocks may be in the form of metal powders, wire, or billet for extrusions. The vacuum environment may have advantages for manufacturing methods such as electron beam freeform fabrication or the production of metals such as titanium. Incorporating other ISRU-derived materials into metal matrix composites could allow robust
structures such as vaults and landing pads to be developed using additive manufacturing techniques.
Teams can demonstrate the production of products using feedstocks that would likely be available from an ISRU metal production pipeline. An example would be the use of iron which is produced as a byproduct of an oxygen extraction system from ilmenite ores which are common on the lunar surface. Perhaps the quality of the feedstock can be increased using innovative processes and methods that take advantage of the lunar environment.
Teams are invited to submit proposals that focus on any part(s) of the product lifecycle* from prospecting to testing, including:
• Prospecting for metal-bearing ores
• Ore extraction from bulk regolith
• Beneficiation/Refining processes
• Smelting and other metal reduction methods
• Feedstock forming and alloying from ISRU-derived metals
• Handling of materials used in metal production
• Additive manufacturing and joining with ISRU-derived feedstock
• Production of metal matrix composites
• Extrusion and drawing methods tailored for use in the lunar environment where a complex
infrastructure is not available
• Test and qualification of ISRU-derived metal products such as storage vessels for liquids and gases, extrusions, pipes, power cables, and supporting structures
REQUIRED CAPABILITIES
• Able to demonstrate a facet of any part of the metal product production pipeline
• Able to operate for long periods in the harsh lunar environment (e.g., pervasive and abrasive lunar dust, vacuum, wide temperature ranges, etc.). See DSNE for more information on lunar applications.
• Minimal barriers to NASA adoption/commercial infusion (e.g., cost-effective, low mass, small size, low power, simplicity, high reliability, etc.)
• Technologies should reach a minimum system-level Technology Readiness Level (TRL) of 4** at the end of the challenge. For the purposes of this challenge, TRL 4 refers to:
o Operation on Earth with analog materials and in relevant environments
o Analysis showing the design can operate in targeted environments (environmental testing on critical subsystems is highly encouraged)
• Must demonstrate a working system/sub-system
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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This is going to require a LOT of regolith simulant for testing during the developmental process; Is NASA supplying it? Are there large vacuum chambers available for testing the equipment in a simulated lunar environment?
The key obstacles to metal refining on the Moon:
1) The Moon largely lacks the relatively pure ore bodies you find on Earth as a result of hydrothermal processes; The starting material is highly mixed granular material that doesn’t vary a lot from place to place, and nowhere consists of pure compounds of a particular metal.
2) No ready supply of reduced carbon, coal, which is the starting point for most metal refining on earth.
3) Nor is there a supply of largely free oxygen, or large quantities of water to use for cooling.
4) Thermal refining processes work better at scale, hard to test without going all in.
Advantages?
1) There IS reduced iron available mixed with the regolith, in the form of nickel-iron meteors.
2) Vacuum is free, if your process can use it.
3) Undiluted sunlight that can be focused to very high intensity.
So, as a first cut, I’d magnetically separate the reduced iron. That’s the low hanging fruit, that you’d want to pick regardless of what you were subsequently doing.
Then I’d see if you can electrostatically separate the components of the regolith into relatively pure fractions. It’s possible to reduce metals without separating them, but then you have a hard to separate alloy, so it’s best avoided. Here the photoelectric effect might be your friend; The different compounds will have different thresholds for emitting photo-electrons, and thus the particles becoming charged. Just run the material through a ball mill, and then on a belt expose it to various wavelengths of light, separated from sunlight by a grating.
So, now you have streams of relatively pure compounds of various metals, which you need to reduce. You can basically always accomplish that with heat, sometimes aided by some element that would tie up the impurities. On Earth that’s usually carbon, but if you’re dealing with oxides, hydrogen works, too. Both are available on the Moon, but pretty scarce.
So, I’d build a fluidized bed based on recirculating hydrogen gas, heated by focused sunlight. It has to be gas tight, you can’t waste your hydrogen. The outgoing gas stream will contain water and some more volatile elements, you can condense them out, and electrolytically separate the water into hydrogen and oxygen.
Alternatively, a lot of metal oxides can be electrolytically refined in the solid state. They usually aren’t because thermal processes are easier at scale on Earth, but it would be an option on the Moon. I just favor the thermal processes because you can use the sunlight directly, without losing most of it to the inefficiency of the conversion process. But electrolytic refining is easier to do at small scale.
Knowing NASA they probably want some gosh-wow device that you dump regolith into one end of, and out come billets at the other. But refining is an interlocking series of processes, you would actually be looking at a whole ecology of machines.
I looked at this a number of years back and was especially struck by the coal (carbon) problem.
(Since then, I’ve noticed it is a problem in several computer games, where you are unable to obtain it while trying to develop a lifeless world. Some of them even put some small deposits of coal on lifeless moons and such, just so the player doesn’t get stuck, but it seems pretty cheesy.)
As I recall, I finally came away thinking that possibly some sort of distilling process, where everything put in is converted to a gas. The heat requirements would be staggering and the temperatures positively stellar. It would probably require massive mirrors and you would probably wind up bringing the raw materials to the mountain as it would be probably be preferable to do this in space. Since the Moon has no real atmosphere, a rail gun might be the thing. But even so, refining in freefall would requires some serious cleverness as well. Could you spin the superheated ejecta? And how to collect it?
Once you’ve gone to all that effort, it seems it might be preferably to just send robots to bring back much purer stuff from the asteroid belt.
And, of course, it’s difficult to see how much of this could be done on a small scale.
As far as the original regalith-to-metal-in-one-place thing, It seems like any sort of working method for this would be able to go set up shop in Death Valley or the Antarctic, right here on Earth and have large amounts of refined metals stacked up waiting for us when we came out to see how it was doing. This does seem unlikely anytime soon, even if you could get the necessary permits.
–NOTE: When I went to submit this I noticed it had put in the name Steve Poling, along with an email address. I have no idea who this is and I guarantee he has not had access to my machine, so I presume the blog program is having problems with default values in those fields?–
Yeah, it’s been a problem for a while now, the site reads your cookie wrong, and autofills somebody else’s data. It’s been going on randomly for a couple years, I think.
In principle, you can refine most metals using hydrogen rather than carbon, you just need to heat them in the presence of a large excess of hydrogen, which carries the oxygen away, in the same way carbon would carry it away as CO2. Even if the metal oxide is more stable than the water, Le Châtelier’s principle dictates that if you keep removing the water from the system, you WILL eventually reduce the metal oxide.
I hesitate to add a link, since that sends me straight to moderation for a while, but “Hydrogen Ironmaking: How It Works” at MDPI goes over the details. But, really, it’s pretty obviously feasible if you know any chemistry, we just don’t do it because we do have coal, while we have to make the hydrogen.
Of course, carbon is often a desirable impurity in iron, while hydrogen is decidedly not desirable in pretty much any solid metal, but you can bake the residual hydrogen out easily enough.
The actual challenge here isn’t reducing the oxides, it’s separating the various metal oxides prior to reducing them, since, as I said above, you don’t have hydrothermal ore bodies like on Earth, just thoroughly pulverized and mixed random rock.
Hi Brett. The unoxidized metals in the lunar highlands are primarily due to micrometeorites striking the regolith creating a small crucible thereby stripping the oxygen off the metals. What remains is a globule of a mixture of metals including silicon. That molten metal binds adjacent dust grains. Magnetic separation is difficult as everything is coated with nano phase iron.
Energy supply is the challenge. Renewables cannot supply enough energy.
– Beneficiation of unoxidized metal
– Parabolic drapes
– Metal refining
– Calcium wires
– Processing
– Casting
– Molds
– Sheet metal
– Rods/bars
– Tubes
– Wire
– Powder
– Machining
– Initial equipment set
– 3D printing
– Recycling
So much metal there and the side product is Oxygen! Make it so. Starship could land, with no Oxygen left ,but still plenty of Methane, refueling with Oxygen from ISRU, would enable greater payloads.