UK firm to turn moon rock into oxygen and building materials
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
On topic, it’s a very cool idea. A friend and I were recently discussing space. Our question was “but what would we be doing on a colony?” Ie what would a colony do to have its existence make sense or be self sustaining? Having a source of oxygen would go a long ways to make the equation make sense.
ULA's vision is "Cislunar 1000"[0], to have an industrial economy on Mars and in orbit, enabled by fuel production on the moon. They hope to reuse their upper stages by converting them into space tugs powered by lunar fuel.
The problem with ULA is that they don't have the resources of Musk or Bezos behind them. Rather than creating the future themselves, they need to convince someone (aka NASA) to pay them to create the future.
The vision driving Bezos to invest into Blue Origin is the idea of moving industry off of Earth and into Space where it can do no harm. The moon is a focus of Blue Origin.
Both Blue Origin & ULA use Hydrogen & Oxygen for their upper stages, so the article isn't particular useful for them. The best way to get Hydrogen on the moon is to electrolyze water, and that also creates oxygen.
However, this would be very useful to SpaceX or any other Methane-Oxygen based rockets. There's no known substantial source of carbon on the moon so Methane can't be synthesized there, but Starship uses 3.55X as much oxygen as methane, so if oxygen can be locally produced, many fewer refueling launches from Earth become necessary.
0: https://www.space.com/33297-satellite-refueling-business-pro...
I believe we need a moon base first before attempting to send people to Mars. Both are super dangerous, but at least you can reach and return from the moon within days if need be. I'm afraid the first mars missions will be one-way trips - and the astronauts will be aware of this as well.