Author Topic: Making Liquid Methane on the Moon  (Read 23190 times)

Offline jongoff

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Re: Making Liquid Methane on the Moon
« Reply #20 on: 07/17/2018 05:11 am »
I seem to recall that there is some controversy about the LCROSS results. They may not be valid or widely applicable so caution is suggested.
Hop is right about the 5.5 factor correction.  But I understand that it doesn’t apply to the water but to the other species.  I would really like to get a definitive list of the corrected percentages.

That jibes with what Paul Spudis was telling me when I asked about it. Basically they had data from two sources, one was an IR spectrometer and another was a Lyman Alpha Spectrometer. The IR one had been used many times before and was relatively easy to calibrate, while the Lyman Alpha one was trickier to calibrate and had less flight experience. The erroneous data for the CO and other non-water species were made using the LAS, while the water reading was picked up by both. Or something to that effect--the conversation was from a few years back.

~Jon

Offline A_M_Swallow

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Re: Making Liquid Methane on the Moon
« Reply #21 on: 07/22/2018 09:58 pm »
A robotic rover able to accurately determine the composition of the regolith around the lunar poles needs to be sent within 4-5 years. Most of the parts, such as spectrum analysers, already exists. The Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program means this could be built and landed for something like $300-$400 million. The cost justification is that developing methalox ascent stages followed by an emergency development of hydrolox ascent stages would waste billions of dollars and several years.

Offline QuantumG

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Re: Making Liquid Methane on the Moon
« Reply #22 on: 07/22/2018 11:07 pm »
Good luck getting $400M to do a robotic lunar mission.
Human spaceflight is basically just LARPing now.

Offline A_M_Swallow

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Re: Making Liquid Methane on the Moon
« Reply #23 on: 07/23/2018 12:06 am »
Good luck getting $400M to do a robotic lunar mission.


I have no objections to it being cheaper. It is however preparation for the manned landings.

Offline QuantumG

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Re: Making Liquid Methane on the Moon
« Reply #24 on: 07/23/2018 12:23 am »
I have no objections to it being cheaper. It is however preparation for the manned landings.

There's no budget for robotic precursor missions. It's a miracle LRO/LCROSS got there.

If we see a COTS-like effort for commercial rovers, there might be a chance... but so far that looks pretty unlikely. While the rest of us (including the GAO, shockingly) agree that the lesson of COTS was that vast cost savings and (some) funding stability due to that are available if this model is adapted, the lesson NASA learnt is that giving weak requirements to commercial contractors and letting them figure out the details encourages the general public (and Congress) to question why NASA needs to have engineers and facilities and deep fiefdoms of "oversight". If, as Elon Musk has said, if a contractor who "had no idea what [they] were doing" can deliver the mail, then what *is* all that oversight for? If you're really truly willing to cancel a contract if the contractor doesn't deliver (shock!) then the contractor has a motivation to deliver. Crazy isn't it? Whereas if the contractor knows that virtually nothing will get their contract cancelled, they can drag their feet and they'll never say no if NASA changes the requirements half way through development.

/rant
Human spaceflight is basically just LARPing now.

Offline MATTBLAK

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Re: Making Liquid Methane on the Moon
« Reply #25 on: 07/23/2018 01:04 am »
If making a hydrocarbon like methane on the Moon ends up being in the too-hard basket, or water ice and hence hydrogen being more scarce than desired: what about revisiting the lunar oxygen production idea touted in the 1990s? 'LUNOX' made from aluminum and other oxides in the regolith would still cut down drastically the amount of mass shipped from Earth. Liquid oxygen is often the weightiest component of cryogenic rocket propellants.

https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19960002346.pdf  (ignore the nuclear thermal propulsion part - sadly, may never fly, politically)

The fuel part could be LNG, Kerosene, methane or monomethyl-hydrazine brought from Earth. The lunar oxygen could be shipped up to a propellant depot by cargo shuttles running from the lunar facility. Maybe...

http://www.astronautix.com/l/lunox.html
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Offline QuantumG

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Re: Making Liquid Methane on the Moon
« Reply #26 on: 07/23/2018 01:08 am »
Honestly, I don't see humans going back to the Moon to do anything other than flags and footprints... and if they do it'll be ISS on the Moon with expeditions to do "science". Industrial processing of the Moon - that's some Silicon Valley "disruption".
Human spaceflight is basically just LARPing now.

Offline A_M_Swallow

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Re: Making Liquid Methane on the Moon
« Reply #27 on: 07/23/2018 01:23 am »
I have no objections to it being cheaper. It is however preparation for the manned landings.

There's no budget for robotic precursor missions. It's a miracle LRO/LCROSS got there.

If we see a COTS-like effort for commercial rovers, there might be a chance... but so far that looks pretty unlikely. While the rest of us (including the GAO, shockingly) agree that the lesson of COTS was that vast cost savings and (some) funding stability due to that are available if this model is adapted, the lesson NASA learnt is that giving weak requirements to commercial contractors and letting them figure out the details encourages the general public (and Congress) to question why NASA needs to have engineers and facilities and deep fiefdoms of "oversight". If, as Elon Musk has said, if a contractor who "had no idea what [they] were doing" can deliver the mail, then what *is* all that oversight for? If you're really truly willing to cancel a contract if the contractor doesn't deliver (shock!) then the contractor has a motivation to deliver. Crazy isn't it? Whereas if the contractor knows that virtually nothing will get their contract cancelled, they can drag their feet and they'll never say no if NASA changes the requirements half way through development.

/rant


Lets see how much oversight CLPS gives NASA. We can check in 4 years time.

Offline MATTBLAK

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Re: Making Liquid Methane on the Moon
« Reply #28 on: 07/23/2018 01:23 am »
Sigh... 'Flags and footprints' though sometimes accurate is a tired pejorative. If 4x Astronauts were staying for a series of full, 14 day lunar days, that would be quite an achievement and would advance the state of the art of space operations by a magnitude. Getting them to stay two full day/night cycles would be amazing. Protecting them from the radiation, thermal cycles, dust and having the equipment stay reliable would be major steps forward; just as the leap from two week Shuttle missions to months on ISS was a big leap.

And being able to do some sort of propellant ISRU on the Moon would start to banish the spectre of 'Flags & Footprints' once and for all.

"If God had meant us to go into space; he would have given us a Moon!" should be my new Sigline - but the other one still seems to be relevant :'(
« Last Edit: 07/23/2018 01:23 am by MATTBLAK »
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Offline Rocket Surgeon

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Re: Making Liquid Methane on the Moon
« Reply #29 on: 07/24/2018 06:14 am »
Honestly, I don't see humans going back to the Moon to do anything other than flags and footprints... and if they do it'll be ISS on the Moon with expeditions to do "science". Industrial processing of the Moon - that's some Silicon Valley "disruption".

I generally agree, unless something of value (like a decent source of fuel) can be found.

I sometimes wonder about the viability of Asteroid mining, not from a delta V perspective, but from a time perspective. Take Deimos for example. Energetically, it is easier to get to Deimos than the Moon, however, you can only do it every 2 years. Thus I think the Moon then becomes the more practical target as a source for water/fuel/ valuables (if they are there). Same is potentially true for Near-Earth Asteroids. Even if it's easier to get there energetically, if you can only do it every few years, then it may not be worth it.

Hence why I started this thread, we KNOW you can get Methalox from other places in the solar system, its just whether or not there is a source closer energetically than Earth and closer practically than Mars. If not, Hydrolox will probably dominate and SpaceX will have to develop a Hydrolox engine in the future if they want to move beyond Earth-Mars trips (granted, that would potentially be almost half a century out before they would need to so that's no indictment of their plan)

Offline guckyfan

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Re: Making Liquid Methane on the Moon
« Reply #30 on: 07/24/2018 12:51 pm »
Hence why I started this thread, we KNOW you can get Methalox from other places in the solar system, its just whether or not there is a source closer energetically than Earth and closer practically than Mars. If not, Hydrolox will probably dominate and SpaceX will have to develop a Hydrolox engine in the future if they want to move beyond Earth-Mars trips (granted, that would potentially be almost half a century out before they would need to so that's no indictment of their plan)

I am not sure if it was Elon Musk or Tom Mueller who said this. Going outward from Mars a hydrolox engine may be more efficient.

Offline speedevil

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Re: Making Liquid Methane on the Moon
« Reply #31 on: 07/24/2018 01:14 pm »
I am not sure if it was Elon Musk or Tom Mueller who said this. Going outward from Mars a hydrolox engine may be more efficient.
Many (most?) applications of a hydrolox engine going out from Mars are going to be either quite low thrust, or amenable to with not much penalty to intermittent thrust, rather than one high G burst.
This would in principle mean that a simple large uninsulated hydrogen tank, feeding a RCS class thruster could be quite adequate for many applications beyond, even if you would like to use BFS, without going through the effort of redoing the engines.

Offline jpo234

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Re: Making Liquid Methane on the Moon
« Reply #32 on: 08/07/2018 12:17 pm »
Honestly, I don't see humans going back to the Moon to do anything other than flags and footprints... and if they do it'll be ISS on the Moon with expeditions to do "science". Industrial processing of the Moon - that's some Silicon Valley "disruption".
Jeff Bezos is on record that he will go there with or without external support.
You want to be inspired by things. You want to wake up in the morning and think the future is going to be great. That's what being a spacefaring civilization is all about. It's about believing in the future and believing the future will be better than the past. And I can't think of anything more exciting than being out there among the stars.

Offline QuantumG

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Re: Making Liquid Methane on the Moon
« Reply #33 on: 08/07/2018 10:44 pm »
Jeff Bezos is on record that he will go there with or without external support.

Ohhhh! The guy who hasn't even been to *orbit* yet says he's going to the Moon! Well, then...

Human spaceflight is basically just LARPing now.

Offline speedevil

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Re: Making Liquid Methane on the Moon
« Reply #34 on: 08/07/2018 10:46 pm »
Jeff Bezos is on record that he will go there with or without external support.

Ohhhh! The guy who hasn't even been to *orbit* yet says he's going to the Moon! Well, then...
To be fair, his backup plan of stacking dollar bills till he reaches the moon is going pretty well.

Offline Chasm

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Re: Making Liquid Methane on the Moon
« Reply #35 on: 08/08/2018 03:57 am »
Jeff Bezos is on record that he will go there with or without external support.

Ohhhh! The guy who hasn't even been to *orbit* yet says he's going to the Moon! Well, then...
To be fair, his backup plan of stacking dollar bills till he reaches the moon is going pretty well.

Using quaters he can already afford to go the distance trice. (~55 billion one way.)
Sounds about right for going to the moon and building a methane factory there. :)

1/3 of the wealth is not that exorbitantly expensive either in the grand scheme of things.

Offline Rocket Surgeon

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Re: Making Liquid Methane on the Moon
« Reply #36 on: 08/09/2018 01:32 am »
So slightly off topic, but what work has been done on making fuel on the Moon?
A lot of people talk about Hydrolox and Aluminium/Oxygen hybrid rockets, is there anything else that's been given some serious thought?

Offline speedevil

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Re: Making Liquid Methane on the Moon
« Reply #37 on: 08/09/2018 04:10 am »
So slightly off topic, but what work has been done on making fuel on the Moon?
A lot of people talk about Hydrolox and Aluminium/Oxygen hybrid rockets, is there anything else that's been given some serious thought?
Other than Methane, Hydrogen and Aluminium, little is plausible.

Going from Methane to Alcohol, Hydrazine, or Kerosene would in principle be possible, but it would involve more processing, for limited obvious result.

Offline jpo234

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Re: Making Liquid Methane on the Moon
« Reply #38 on: 08/09/2018 09:48 am »
Jeff Bezos is on record that he will go there with or without external support.

Ohhhh! The guy who hasn't even been to *orbit* yet says he's going to the Moon! Well, then...
He has the most important ingredient: almost unlimited funding.
You want to be inspired by things. You want to wake up in the morning and think the future is going to be great. That's what being a spacefaring civilization is all about. It's about believing in the future and believing the future will be better than the past. And I can't think of anything more exciting than being out there among the stars.

Offline LMT

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Re: Making Liquid Methane on the Moon
« Reply #39 on: 08/17/2018 03:14 pm »
I seem to recall that there is some controversy about the LCROSS results. They may not be valid or widely applicable so caution is suggested.
Hop is right about the 5.5 factor correction.  But I understand that it doesn’t apply to the water but to the other species.  I would really like to get a definitive list of the corrected percentages.

That jibes with what Paul Spudis was telling me when I asked about it. Basically they had data from two sources, one was an IR spectrometer and another was a Lyman Alpha Spectrometer. The IR one had been used many times before and was relatively easy to calibrate, while the Lyman Alpha one was trickier to calibrate and had less flight experience. The erroneous data for the CO and other non-water species were made using the LAS, while the water reading was picked up by both. Or something to that effect--the conversation was from a few years back.

~Jon

See Hurley et al. 2012, Table 2:  CO abundance in regolith: 1.3 wt%, with caveats.

Example application Q:

How much regolith would be mined to deliver a full SpaceX ITS LCH4 load (240 t) to LEO?

If ISRU extracted all CO, and all carbon were derived only from CO, and each round-trip flight delivered 40% to LEO, you'd mine ~ 80,000 t of regolith for each full LEO LCH4 load.

Refs

Hurley, D. M., Gladstone, G. R., Stern, S. A., Retherford, K. D., Feldman, P. D., Pryor, W., ... & Parker, J. W. (2012). Modeling of the vapor release from the LCROSS impact: 2. Observations from LAMP. Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, 117(E12).
« Last Edit: 08/17/2018 03:15 pm by LMT »

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