In the United States, a company is working on a technology to deprive the Earth satellite of a particular resource:regolith. For many, this lunar dust indeed has enormous potential value. However, it would be a question of using the materials obtained directly on the Moon.
Regolith is the part of the soil covering the source rock and which may contain loose material , namely dust, earth and healthy rocks. On the Moon, the soil is composed of 50% oxygen, the rest being divided between silicon (20%), aluminum (10%) as well as small amounts of titanium, magnesium and iron. However, as Ars Technica explains in an article of January 22, 2022, the American start-up Lunar Resources wishes to exploit the lunar soil .
Drawing inspiration from metal extraction technology from NASA, this company thinks it can heat the regolith to a very high temperature before carrying out electrolysis. The goal ? Reveal the oxygen and metals listed above. According to Lunar Resources, the machine used for the process should be one meter high. In addition, a small lunar rover should take care of delivering balls of regolith to be melted.
But why is Lunar Resources interested in regolith? Officially, there is talk of reusing materials to make tools directly on the Moon . The start-up plans, among other things, to manufacture electrical systems.
Elliot Carol, its CEO, is known to have had a career in hedge fund management before becoming interested in the space industry and the Moon. However, he is not the only one to have set his sights on the Earth satellite. It should be remembered, however, that the potential commercialization of extraterrestrial goods conflicts with the Outer Space Treaty of 1966. “Lunar Resources, Inc. is a pioneering space industrial company in space manufacturing, above-ground resource extraction, and in-situ resource utilization [… ] Our goal is to develop and commercialize space resource manufacturing and extraction technologies to catalyze the space economy” , can we read on the website of the start-up.
In 2018, the European Space Agency (ESA) had already shown its interest in regolith. As part of the development of a permanent moon base , she had the idea of 3D printing regolith buildings. Engineers have already made promising impressions of objects (screws, gears, etc.) with a material simulating regolith. It must be said that the abundance of the latter on the Moon would in particular save the transport of construction materials from Earth .
