Oxygen Made From Moon Dust For First Time (telegraph.co.uk)
- Reference: 0181607580
- News link: https://science.slashdot.org/story/26/04/11/2250208/oxygen-made-from-moon-dust-for-first-time
- Source link: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/04/09/oxygen-made-from-moon-dust-for-the-first-time/
Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin ""announced this week that it had developed a reactor that could successfully release oxygen from lunar soil by using an electric current."
> Almost half of Moon dust — the thin layer of rock that blankets the lunar surface — is oxygen, but it is bound to metals such as iron and titanium... Previous work to isolate oxygen has been lab-based, and the unwieldy equipment needed has been too difficult to send to the Moon. In contrast, Blue Origin said its small-scale reactor, named Air Pioneer, could be made flight-ready to "provide the first breath of life for a sustainable Moon base"... As well as breathable air, Blue Origin said the reactor produces other critical elements for planetary infrastructure, such as iron, aluminium and silicon for construction and electronics, as well as glass for windows and solar panel covers. The company has previously said it wants to turn the Moon, and eventually Mars, into "self-sustaining worlds where robots and humans can go beyond visiting and truly explore, grow, live, and thrive"....
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> Blue Origin said it would need to generate around one megawatt of power to drive the reactors — about the energy it would require to power around 400 to 1,000 homes simultaneously. It envisages that each lunar settlement would have an array of nearby solar panels, generating the power needed for one reactor.
Besides breathable air for astronauts, the oxygen could also be used in propellant for refuelling landers and fuel cells, Blue Origin points out — and "produced right where they're needed, and at much lower cost than being brought from Earth."
Thanks to Slashdot reader [2]fjo3 for sharing the article.
[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/04/09/oxygen-made-from-moon-dust-for-the-first-time/
[2] https://www.slashdot.org/~fjo3
Science forgotten (Score:2)
> ... array of nearby solar panels ...
Batteries not included: Please remember, the lunar night lasts 10 Earth days.
Re: (Score:3)
The produced oxygen and other materials can be stored, therefore there is no need to store the energy in batteries.
There is also a solution to providing continuous solar power without batteries, if the base is near a pole. Put solar panels in a circle around the pole, so that at any given time, some of the panels are in sunshine. I read a paper abstract about this that said the panels should be at 87 degrees latitude (about 100 miles from the pole). I don't know why. It seems feasible.
Re: (Score:3)
[1]https://www.sciencedirect.com/... [sciencedirect.com]
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0960148122001550
This is more exciting that circling the mooon (Score:2)
Sorry to say, but this seems more exciting than our recent circle of the moon.
The lunar base feels a little closer, although Im sure the process needs a lot of refinement and how to get sustained power up there will be interesting.
More info would be nice (Score:2)
The article mentions using 1MW of power but no mention of how much oxygen it can produce in a given time frame. Disappointingly vague.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes. Doing some back of the envelope calculations, I get yield at 100% efficiency of about 4 tons of oxygen an hour. Even more reasonable assumptions would be about 1 ton an hour, which sounds feasible. I am less certain about the feasibility of shipping that many solar panels to the moon and setting them all up, before you could get the operation going. It could be done, but is it really a useful way to spend resources?
Perhaps not as important as it might sound (Score:2)
While there's probably good use cases for this (I'd imagine particularly if you are able to actually utilize your "waste" metals produced by this), the allusion to "breathable" oxygen implies this could perhaps solve the issue of securing breathable air for your would be lunar station denizens.
But people don't destroy oxygen, we convert it into CO2, and CO2 is energetically cheaper to electro-chemically break down back to carbon and oxygen, and perhaps even more importantly, if we're talking a permanent moo
Re: (Score:2)
I believe the purpose is also for rocket fuel. Which would require much more oxygen than a moderately sized moon base. And the process generates metals, which can be used to make more rockets.
he did nto invent anything its been done for 180 y (Score:1)
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
It is a well know process there is nothing new. You learn how to do your secend week in metallurgy class.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deoxidization
Breathable oxygen != breathable air (Score:2)
Air on Earth is about 80% nitrogen. Guess how much nitrogen the moon has? None. Or so close to none that it's practically the same. Breathing pure oxygen is really not a good idea.
This is still useful and it will be a help for doing lots of things on the moon. But don't think it means you can produce breathable air on the moon.
Re: (Score:2)
We don't need the Nitrogen to breathe. Obviously we could just go with a lower pressure pure O2, but this is a fire risk (see Apollo 1)
Deep sea divers breathe a Helium/Oxygen mixture, and there has been some talk of mining for Helium-3 in the lunar polar regions.
Re: (Score:2)
Imagine living on the actual moon and yet being unable to share a single voice call or a recording of your voice without earth humans viciously mocking you for your helium induced falsetto.
Re: (Score:2)
Nobody is proposing to add helium to the atmosphere in a lunar base. This is done in deep-sea exploration because they need a high pressure atmosphere, and they can't use nitrogen because it is narcotic at high pressure (not to mention the need for decompression to avoid risk of the bends when ascending).
Lower pressure does not change your vocal timber.
Re: (Score:1)
There is not enough he3 on the moon in any one spot to fill a lung its pipe dream.
Re: Breathable oxygen != breathable air (Score:2)
You clearly need to learn a little about gas dynamics. It's all about partial pressure.
Air is about 20% oxygen. So humans need about 20% oxygen at one atmosphere to function well under most exertion levels. You can do with less, but let's ignore that for now.
If you reduced the habitat pressure to 1/5 ATM then you could easily survive in pure oxygen. In fact, if you were building a long term habitat you'd want the lowest internal pressure which is survivable to reduce the stresses on its hull. So 1/5 atmosph
Made? (Score:2)
I presume they mean that they extracted oxygen because making oxygen via fusion or fission seems unrealistic.
Re: (Score:3)
The plan is to isolate molecular oxygen from iron and aluminum oxides using electrolysis. The by- products would be elemental iron and aluminum which would be of great use to a budding young lunar colony.
Re: (Score:2)
Not all reactors are fission or fusion. Most any device that produces a reaction (in this case, a chemical reaction) may be referred to as a reactor.
Re: (Score:2)
I think his point was that as stated in the headline, they didn't make the oxygen; it was already there. They're just freeing it from its chemical bonds.
Pedantic, I know, but it's true.
Reading is difficult (Score:2)
> I presume they mean that they extracted oxygen because making oxygen via fusion or fission seems unrealistic.
What's pretty cool about reading is that you don't have to presume anything. Like, imagine a world where you could've been assed to read just up to the second sentence of the summary where you would've learned " Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin ""announced this week that it had developed a reactor that could successfully release oxygen from lunar soil by using an electric current."
You could've spared us from you proudly proclaiming how lazy you are