[HN Gopher] Blue Origin manufactured solar cell prototype from l...
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Blue Origin manufactured solar cell prototype from lunar regolith
simulants
Author : LLcolD
Score : 199 points
Date : 2023-02-14 14:46 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.blueorigin.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.blueorigin.com)
| alexfromapex wrote:
| Are they accounting for the oxygen input needed for the burning
| process?
| FourHand451 wrote:
| >our reactor produces iron, silicon, and aluminum through
| molten regolith electrolysis, in which an electrical current
| separates those elements from the oxygen to which they are
| bound. Oxygen for propulsion and life support is a byproduct.
|
| It sounds like there isn't oxygen input required.
| waitwhatuh wrote:
| What burning process? There is heating without burning in this
| process (and in fact, most of the things being melted are
| oxides and the energy is used to pull oxygen _off_ of the iron
| and silicon.)
|
| It's electrical heating, not coal fire heating, which requires
| no oxygen.
| johntb86 wrote:
| They're essentially unburning these materials - they're bound
| to oxygen when in the mineral, and they need to separate that
| out.
| jasonlotito wrote:
| So, if this topic interests you, and you want to read a couple
| books related to it, I highly recommend Delta-V and then Critical
| Mass by Daniel Suarez. Both are sci-fi books, and deal with
| precisely this thing.
| politician wrote:
| They control for a lot of factors except, apparently, for
| gravity. It would be awesome if they scaled their foundry down to
| the size of a satellite and tested it in orbit.
| borjah wrote:
| actually is 1/6th gravity, because you are going to produce it
| on the moon. I don't know how long the process is but maybe a
| vomit comet with a different parabola profile to imitate the
| moon gravity could do the trick.
| politician wrote:
| Yeah, I was thinking that they could launch into a
| microgravity environment and approximate the Moon's gravity
| by spinning the sat.
| kibwen wrote:
| This is an interesting development, although note that a full
| day-night cycle on the moon is 29 Earth-days long. This means
| that unless you want to have enough batteries to last two whole
| weeks, you're going to be limited to putting your solar-powered
| outpost in the few places with near-constant access to light;
| basically the high bits of craters near the poles.
| beakergordon wrote:
| On this note, does anyone know the tentative plan for the
| upcoming Artemis missions? Looks like they're slated for 30
| days, but at least a few of those will probably be spent in
| transfer orbits. It makes me wonder if that timeline is
| configured to line up to an exact day-only time window on the
| surface.
| mariusseufzer wrote:
| "Our proprietary transport subsystem [...]" That's where I
| stopped reading.
| ted_dunning wrote:
| You should have read more carefully.
|
| They are talking about transport of molten regolith. Not
| rockets.
| mlindner wrote:
| As long as they dont hamstring themselves by demanding they
| launch on only their own launch vehicles, this has some
| possibility. Better that they spin it out into a separate company
| that would give them the freedom of being launch provider
| agnostic.
| malfist wrote:
| I wouldn't be surprised if they pivot, but the new glenn does
| look promising. Not as promising as starship, but starship's
| numbers are still Elon numbers, which aren't to be trusted
| panick21_ wrote:
| > which aren't to be trusted
|
| Its always funny when people say that.
|
| Musk has been the longest serving CEO in both the Space and
| the Automotive industry. With both companies having an almost
| absurdly good track record of execution.
|
| And yet somehow it isn't trust worthy? Based on what?
| Comments on twitter?
| waitwhatuh wrote:
| > With both companies having an almost absurdly good track
| record of execution.
|
| Musk has consistently produced the wrong numbers. Some
| examples (and there are many, many more):
|
| Number of teslas in 2018? Musk: 500k Actual: 35K
|
| Tesla base price objective, 2016: Musk $35k Actual: Much
| more
|
| Self Driving Cross Country Trip: Musk: in 2017 Actual: NaN
|
| Financing Rounds: Musk (2011) "We will never need another
| financing round" Actual: there were many more
|
| Supercharging cost: Musk (2013) "Always free" Actual:
| Definitely not free
|
| Tesla Semis Production Line Date: Musk: "2019" Actual: Not
| yet happened
|
| Gigafactory placement: Musk (2017) "Two to four more"
| Actual: Only one operational
|
| Hyperloop NY-Phil-Balt-DC: Musk (2017) "I have verbal
| approval, 29 minutes NY-DC" Actual: This appears to be made
| up
|
| Mars Missions: Musk: "Every launch window from 2024 onward"
| Actual: TBD, _maybe_ 2029?
|
| Neurallink: Musk: "Human trials in 2021" Actual: "Lots of
| dead monkeys"
|
| Covid-19 Ventilators: Musk "Our factories will produce
| them" Actual: Musk sent 1,000 cpap machines
|
| Updated Tesla Roadster: Musk: "It exists!" Actual: "It
| doesn't"
|
| There are so, so _so_ many more of these. There 's nothing
| remotely close to an "absurdly good track record". SpaceX
| is doing well because of Shotwell, not Musk, and Tesla has
| been plagued with build quality and recall issues from day
| 1. (To say nothing of absurd repair costs and issues with
| FSD.)
| mlindner wrote:
| Every headline here is missing the nuance and
| misdescribing the comments out of context. Or removing
| the caveats that he himself put on the comment. When
| people preface things with "I think", or "probably" or
| "possibly" or "good chance" you can't just suddenly turn
| it around and say they were predicting the future with a
| crystal ball. This happens so much with Elon's comments
| it's frankly extremely tiring.
|
| And what, you created a brand new account just to post
| this nonsense again? I've seen this before.
| sjsdaiuasgdia wrote:
| Quite a few of these happened in the context of earnings
| calls or other communications to investors. If the guy in
| charge of these companies keeps making statements about
| their future performance and then they repeatedly miss
| the mark, that's a valid thing to criticize and an "I
| think" prefix doesn't absolve him.
| waitwhatuh wrote:
| It's one thing to be off by, say, 5%. It's another thing
| to be years or two orders of magnitude off. I'm not
| expecting Musk to be perfect, I'm expecting him to be
| reasonably close with his predictions.
|
| And many, _many_ of Tesla 's predictions aren't
| predictions. In 2014, Tesla promised full self driving on
| cars _and took money for it_. Those cars today will never
| have it (despite paying for it), and it 's been nearly a
| decade with FSD still an indeterminate period away.
|
| And yeah, new account. That's how I interact with HN --
| create an account, keep it until it gets some amount of
| karma (usually 500-1000) decide it's too much of a drain
| to try and be grounded here, and delete the account.
| Inevitably, someone comes along and makes a breathy and
| incredible claim like "tesla is an absolute success" and
| I feel like I need to come in and provide just a little
| bit of "Hey, so, the facts don't exactly line up
| there..." To be clear, I don't create anti-tesla
| accounts, and this isn't an alt for another existing
| account, I just don't like having a long term account
| here.
| hectorlorenzo wrote:
| > Comments on twitter?
|
| Yes. Mostly his.
| malfist wrote:
| Before you pull out the pitchforks, look at what I said. I
| said his numbers weren't to be trusted. Elon has a well
| documented track record of saying X will be ready by Y date
| and cost Z amount, and all those numbers be wrong.
|
| From the very first model 3, to full self drive, to
| cybertruck, to the boring company, to the starship itself.
| All of those were/are later than the dates that he gave,
| and cost more (for the ones that are for sale) than he said
| they'd cost. He was saying the orbital launch for starship
| was weeks away more than a year ago. It's still not
| happened.
|
| Elon makes his own propaganda
| bpodgursky wrote:
| Sure, you're not wrong on general principle but Starship
| is literally going to attempt an orbital launch in a
| couple weeks (they just did a full test fire), and we
| don't need to take anyone's promises to check the
| numbers.
|
| If it succeeds, New Glenn is going to be superfluous and
| starting at a massive timing disadvantage.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Starship numbers constantly change based on what works in
| tests, how the engines evolve as their production scales up
| and the design gets simplified, etc. New Glenn is still
| lacking all these insights. Both projects are delayed, but if
| I had to bet which one is going to deliver closer to the
| currently promised performance and launch date I'd bet on the
| one that has scaled up prototype production and has performed
| test launches.
| gene-h wrote:
| Blue Origin might already be pivoting. They recently acquired
| Honeybee robotics, a company which is focused on making
| robots for space and other worlds[0]. Honeybee Robotics has
| also done extensive work on In-Situ Resource
| Utilization(ISRU), aka, living off the land.
| [0]https://www.honeybeerobotics.com/news-events/honeybee-
| roboti...
| skykooler wrote:
| New Glenn looks promising on paper, but seven years later we
| haven't seen any hardware and the first launch is perpetually
| "next year". In that time, Starship has been redesigned
| twice, done flight and landing tests, and is preparing for a
| full orbital test, and even the perpetually-delayed SLS has
| flown once.
| ohitsdom wrote:
| > preparing for a full orbital test
|
| Rocket delays are inevitable. But since you mentioned New
| Glenn's perpetual delays, let's also be fair and note that
| Starship's orbital test has been teased by Elon for quite
| awhile now [0]. I happen to think an April/May launch is
| possible, but we'll see. And also good to note that this is
| still very much a "pathfinder" vehicle, in SpaceX's style
| of iterative design & test. So not at all the same as
| whenever New Glenn's first launch will be.
|
| [0] https://twitter.com/ESGhound/status/1622680306342891536
| panick21_ wrote:
| Yeah but New Glenn originally was basically a scaled up
| Falcon 9, aluminum tanks with first stage reuse. Starship
| is fully reusable, a much harder problem. New Glenn
| engine, while staged cycle are not that well optimized
| and its specs aren't that amazing. Raptor is (probably)
| the most advanced engine that has ever been fired.
|
| Falcon Heavy beats New Glenn on most things, so New Glenn
| is more comparable to that generation rocket. New Glenn
| was sized up because Bezos wanted to have something
| bigger then Falcon 9.
| panick21_ wrote:
| The problem with New Glenn is that its basically a
| 'government rocke't. It exists because Blue Origin is
| dropping 2 billion $ a year in loses. New Glenn will never
| even remotely pay back its investment and at best they can
| maybe fly it with profitable operations.
|
| But until then Blue Origin has basically no actual revenue
| beyond a very small amount of BE-4 sales.
|
| Are we expecting Bezos just to continue to drop billions of
| $ into Blue Origin for unlimited amount of time? Because
| non of the projects they have will ever make this company
| profitable.
| LarryMullins wrote:
| > _Are we expecting Bezos just to continue to drop
| billions of $ into Blue Origin for unlimited amount of
| time?_
|
| To be fair, he's been shoveling money into this
| unproductive dumpster fire for more than 20 years
| already.
| panick21_ wrote:
| Well but for the first 10 years it was not really a real
| company, more a hobby project.
|
| Then it got bigger and bigger, but only in the mid 2010s
| did the company seriously start to grow.
|
| He was dropping 1 billion per year towards the end of
| 2010s but the company has been ramping up even more over
| the last 3-5 years.
|
| By now the HR cost alone are probably going towards 2
| billion $ a year, they are not so much smaller then
| SpaceX with no revenue.
| meepmorp wrote:
| Musk and SpaceX parting ways would be great, imo.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| Agree. Shotwell at the helm would be fantastic.
| panick21_ wrote:
| Based on what? Do you just hold everything else constant
| and remove Musk. Is there any evidence that this would be
| the case? Seems to me that all evidence points in the
| opposite direction, and all companies not led by Musk are
| not nearly as ambitious, goals oriented and successful.
|
| If Musk had left the company in 2014, do you think
| Starship and Starlink would be what they are now? Because
| I think that is pretty unlikely.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| To be clear I have not yet perfected my time machine. I
| am not suggesting Musk be replaced in 2014, but now.
| Starship has all the momentum it needs and I have plenty
| of confidence in Shotwell to stabilize that program and
| ensure its success. She seems equally committed to
| getting humanity to Mars but she might be a better face
| for the company, and is certainly competent.
| [deleted]
| panick21_ wrote:
| But what about the next thing. There will always be the
| next big challenge. There are many big challenges left to
| actually make Mars happen. And even if the Mars thing
| happens, what's next?
|
| One could have made the argument that Musk should have
| gone after the Falcon 9 was reusable as well.
|
| Shotwell is certainty competent and would likely do a
| good job as you suggest. But the best thing is if they
| just continue to work together as they have, that seems
| to have worked the best and I wouldn't want to mess with
| it.
| mlindner wrote:
| Indeed if you go back in history at any point of SpaceX's
| past and simply pluck out Elon, lots of things that
| SpaceX does now simply wouldn't have happened.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Isn't it basically Shotwell at he helm right now? Sure,
| Elon is the one giving factory tours, being visionary and
| playing a big role in R&D, but internally Shotwell seems
| to do everything you would expect from a CEO.
|
| Maybe you could argue who's more in charge of strategic
| direction at SpaceX, but on the other hand SpaceX seems
| to be doing great in that division.
| [deleted]
| mlindner wrote:
| You should check out her own words on this from 2021.
| https://archive.ph/p4Nkz
|
| > Shotwell: The way Elon and I share the load, he focuses
| on development. He's still very highly engaged in the
| day-to-day operations, but his focus is on development.
| He was the lead on Starlink, and I started shifting my
| focus to Starlink around late spring, early summer of
| last year. Elon's focus in that time was moving to
| Starship, that is his primary focus at SpaceX. It doesn't
| mean he's not thinking about the company on a day-to-day
| basis, but his emphasis is to get the Starship program to
| orbit.
|
| This of course is slightly old because Shotwell has done
| another shift and has taken (at least temporary) control
| of Starship.
|
| Generally if it's something interacting with the US
| government, Shotwell handles it.
| [deleted]
| LarryMullins wrote:
| Don't fix it if it ain't broke. Despite Elon Musk behaving
| stupidly in many other aspects and areas, SpaceX is still
| working well. Whatever dynamic Musk and Shotwell have
| between them, it's obviously working out well. So don't
| "fix" it if it ain't broke.
| mlindner wrote:
| That would be horrible for the future of SpaceX. Shotwell
| would run it well but she doesn't do pushing boundaries of
| things like Elon. SpaceX would indeed be very successful
| under Shotwell but you could forget them ever landing
| humans on Mars under her leadership, at least not without
| going hand in hand with some eventual NASA plan in the
| 2050s or something (by which point she might have retired
| anyway as she's 8 years older than Elon).
|
| Also maybe it's simply being a good corporate leader, but
| I've seen her stick her neck out and defend Elon many times
| against criticism. They obviously like each other and get
| along with each other. They're both needed.
| moralestapia wrote:
| There's two Musks for me, Tesla (and everyday) Musk and
| SpaceX Musk. The latter has greatly exceeded my expectations!
| kibwen wrote:
| The success of SpaceX appears to be in minimizing the
| amount of damage that Elon is capable of doing with his
| relentless and short-sighted micromanaging.
| panick21_ wrote:
| SpaceX and Tesla are some of the must successful firms in
| two of the most difficult industries on the plant. Musk
| is the longest running CEO in these industries.
|
| There is lots of evidence that his micro-managing as you
| call, is actually really, really successful. And there is
| also a huge amount of evidence that Musk is actually not
| short-sighted, but in fact thinks far ahead of the
| competitors.
|
| In 2014, the Gigafactory was considered crazy and a car
| company investing so much of its own capital in something
| that suppliers were supposed to do, was seen as idiotic.
| Now this model is literally copied by everybody. In the
| meantime, Tesla was a tiny car company in 2017, still
| seen as somewhat of a joke. But even then they were
| already starting to transition into a battery company and
| now Tesla makes it own batteries, based on its own
| chemistries in its own battery factory that is run with
| its in-house designed and manufacturing machines.
|
| So while GM and its partner is still trying to get its
| first own Gigafactory online (and suffering serious
| delays), Tesla has moved past that and is literally
| building its own factories with its own chemistry.
|
| We could go threw countless other examples. People love
| to pick out cases where things didn't work and ignore all
| the other cases where it did work.
| kibwen wrote:
| _> now Tesla makes it own batteries, based on its own
| chemistries in its own battery factory that is run with
| its in-house designed and manufacturing machines_
|
| It's entirely unclear to me whether or not Tesla's
| battery manufacturing is bearing any fruit in practice.
| Here's the most recent article I found, from September:
| https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-
| transportation/inside...
|
| _The sources predict that Tesla will find it difficult
| to fully implement the new dry-coating manufacturing
| process before the end of this year, and perhaps not
| until 2023. Stan Whittingham, a co-inventor of lithium-
| ion batteries and a 2019 Nobel laureate, believes Tesla
| Chief Executive Elon Musk has been overly optimistic on
| the time frame for commercializing the new technique._
|
| _[...]_
|
| _Tesla acquired the know-how in 2019 when it paid over
| $200 million for Maxwell Technologies, a company in San
| Diego making ultracapacitors, which store energy for
| devices that need quick bursts of electricity, such as
| camera flashes._
|
| _[...]_
|
| _" They can produce in small volume, but when they
| started big volume production, Tesla ended up with many
| rejects, too many," one of the sources with ties to Tesla
| told Reuters. Production yields were so low that all the
| anticipated cost savings from the new process were lost,
| the source said._
|
| This sounds exactly like Elon Musk's usual MO: 1) acquire
| a company and then take credit for their inventions in
| order to paint himself as a visionary, 2) overpromise and
| underdeliver, counting on his legions of blind faithful
| to keep stock prices irrationally high in the process,
| and 3) base all profitability on the availability of
| government handouts, in this case the tax incentives for
| US-sourced batteries.
| FredPret wrote:
| Reminds me of a book I just read - Critical Mass by Daniel Suarez
| we_never_see_it wrote:
| I have started rooting for Blue Origin after Elon Musk turned out
| to be a right wing extremist. Good to see they are making
| progress.
| panick21_ wrote:
| Talked about here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34774110
| aj7 wrote:
| One early Saturday morning around 1975 I walked into the Berkeley
| Physics Dept. student machine shop. A bunch of nerds were
| clustered around a big lathe that no one ever used because it had
| so much backlash. Chucked in the lathe was a vacuum flange
| monolithically attached to a broken glass tube that menacingly
| stuck out from the headstock. Inside the glass tube was some
| black gritty shit. The ways of the lathe had been carefully
| covered with pristine Kim-Wipes. I gathered that this was part of
| a mass spectrometer.
|
| The black shit were Apollo moon rocks that this group had
| analyzed for isotopic abundance. This grit was being reclaimed
| from the spectrometer glass-tube flange part. "We have to account
| for every last gram of this NASA sample."
|
| There was a little residue off to the side. I touched it.
| [deleted]
| UberFly wrote:
| Finish the good story with the part about super powers...
| ramesh31 wrote:
| I would think they need an orbital class rocket first? Their
| timeline is making SLS look good by comparison.
| waitwhatuh wrote:
| Would they? Surely they could also contract on other carriers?
| imiric wrote:
| I wish space companies would cooperate for the benefit of all
| humankind, so that we wouldn't need to reinvent the wheel every
| time. Competition is good, but waiting for the entire
| production line to be solved by a single company would delay
| our efforts by decades.
|
| Let SpaceX focus on the rockets, and Blue Origin on
| bootstrapping a moon base.
| Octokiddie wrote:
| > To make long-term presence on the Moon viable, we need abundant
| electrical power. We can make power systems on the Moon directly
| from materials that exist everywhere on the surface, without
| special substances brought from Earth. We have pioneered the
| technology and demonstrated all the steps. Our approach, Blue
| Alchemist, can scale indefinitely, eliminating power as a
| constraint anywhere on the Moon.
|
| There's a missing step in there - the production of solar cells
| on the lunar surface. Having the materials to do so is one thing,
| but being able to manufacture them to spec on the surface of the
| moon is another. The article only lightly touches on this.
|
| Still, this is a surprising achievement from an organization I
| didn't even know did chemistry.
| M95D wrote:
| So they can make a solar panel from regolith. Good, but not good
| enough. Can they build another reactor using only regolith, solar
| panels and their first reactor?
| gene-h wrote:
| What they don't mention is how efficient the solar cells produced
| are. NASA's NIAC studied making solar cells in a similar manner
| and estimated they could produce solar cells with 6-9%
| efficiency[0]. Efficiency was limited due to impurities in the
| silicon they produced. They have made some pretty big
| improvements over the NIAC work by being able to produce cover
| glass, which the NIAC study didn't even consider.
|
| Another big question is how much mass needs to be shipped up from
| earth to manufacturer solar cells. Dopants will still need to be
| shipped up as they cannot currently be obtained with this method,
| but the mass per area solar cell is practically nothing. More
| concerning are the electrodes for their electrolysis cell.
|
| They are literally electrolyzing molten lava. Molten silicates
| are a very good solvent and the hot oxidizing environment of the
| anode is quite harsh. We do have materials which can withstand
| this environment, but how long will they last? How much power can
| the whole set up produce and would it be more than landing the
| setup's weight in solar cells?
|
| Regardless this is still a major advance. Materials processing of
| this level suitable for the lunar environment has not been
| previously demonstrated.
|
| [0]https://www.niac.usra.edu/files/library/meetings/annual/jun0..
| .
| SECProto wrote:
| > Another big question is how much mass needs to be shipped up
| from earth to manufacturer solar cells.
|
| If you take the linked page at face value, it explicitly
| states:
|
| > without special substances brought from Earth.
|
| (I suspect, like most press releases, some important details
| aren't being provided. Maybe dopants aren't considered "special
| substances")
| gene-h wrote:
| This study[0] estimated that less than a microgram of dopant
| is needed per m^2 and that producing 5 MW of solar cells
| requires 1 gram of phosphorous. [0]https://ascelibrary.org/do
| i/abs/10.1061/(ASCE)0893-1321(2001...
| dotnet00 wrote:
| They claim to achieve 99.999% purity on the silicon, so it
| sounds like they might do better than 6-9% on efficiency. But
| then again if they were anywhere near Earth produced panels,
| they would probably be saying that to everyone who would
| listen.
| jmyeet wrote:
| > What they don't mention is how efficient the solar cells
| produced are.
|
| This... may or may not matter. When it comes to solar power on
| the Moon, there are significant advantages and some serious
| disadvantages. The most obvious advantage is that there is no
| weather and no atmosphere. This means a lunar solar cell has
| way more potential power generation than an terrestrial solar
| cell. The big disadvantage is the long day night cycle. The
| Moon is tidally locked with Earth with an orbit of 28 days so
| that's basically 14 days of day and 14 days of night.
|
| You have to work around this problem with batteries, which add
| a ton more mass, having panels (and settlements most likely) at
| the poles or running a network of solar cells around the Moon
| with power cables.
|
| Settling the poles makes sense as this is where the most water
| is.
|
| But having a network of panels probably makes a lot of sense
| too. For one, aluminium is abundant so making electrical cables
| should be entirely possible.
|
| > Another big question is how much mass needs to be shipped up
| from earth to manufacturer solar cells.
|
| Yes, this is a huge factor, probably way more than efficiency
| is. Or at least we should look at power generation per unit
| mass shipped from EArth.
| super5000 wrote:
| If they're going to make solar panels on the moon, perhaps
| the creativity won't stop there: Maybe we don't need to ship
| batteries, either.
|
| They can make batteries out of moon rocks [1], use fly
| wheels, melt lava, etc. None super efficiently, but as a
| start.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_battery
| ricardobeat wrote:
| Isn't solar exposure on the moon stronger than earth due to the
| lack of an atmosphere? Efficiency per sqm might end up being
| higher.
| beakergordon wrote:
| I think the implied comparison was: do we launch panels to
| the moon or build them in-situ? The increased solar exposure
| should boost both of these cases by the same percentage, but
| if the Earth-manufactured panel is (e.g.) 3x as efficient, it
| might still make more sense to ship them.
| dr_orpheus wrote:
| Yep, you get about 36% more sun above the atmosphere. 1361
| W/m^2 above the atmosphere vs ~1000 W/m^2 on a clear day [0].
|
| Now you just need to bring big enough batteries to survive 14
| days in a row with no sun.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_irradiance#Irradiance
| _on...
| beefield wrote:
| I think you might find places relatively close each other
| in the moon polar areas that are in aggregate illuminated
| most if not all the time.
|
| https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/34025/moon-
| polar-d...
| joemi wrote:
| Wouldn't it be smarter to build on the far side of the
| moon? Then you don't need to worry about the Earth
| obscuring the sun at all, right? Or were you referring to
| some other phenomena?
| outworlder wrote:
| You still get the Moon obscuring itself. The Earth is not
| eclipsing the Sun most of the time.
| 867-5309 wrote:
| the moon is tidally locked to the Earth, i.e. it does not
| rotate about an axis, and takes ~27 days to orbit.
| therefore around half of those days are in darkness at
| any given point on its surface, hence the lunar phases
| joemi wrote:
| Ah yeah, makes sense... I confused myself.
| leidenfrost wrote:
| Considering the fact that you have the entire moon as
| available surface, you'd rather lift a giant rock with that
| power and store all the potential gravitational energy as a
| "battery".
|
| A 10 ton rock, lifted up to 50m high, will store up to 810M
| Joules at moon gravity
| [deleted]
| sbierwagen wrote:
| >A 10 ton rock, lifted up to 50m high, will store up to
| 810M Joules at moon gravity
|
| Wrong prefix? I think you meant 810K Joules.
|
| For Earth gravity: 10,000 kg times 9.8 m/s^2 times 50 m =
| 4.9 megajoules, 1.36 kilowatthours. (Anker sells a 2.04
| KWh battery pack for US$1999:
| https://www.anker.com/products/a1780 The manual says it
| masses 30.5 kg, so that's a cool 491.88x difference in
| mass power density.)
|
| Again, that's for _Earth_ gravity. Lunar gravity: 10,000
| kg times 1.62 m /s^2 times 50 m = 0.81 megajoules, 0.225
| kilowatthours. (2,976x difference in mass power density
| vs the lithium battery.)
|
| Gravity storage isn't economical on Earth, and it's
| really not economical on the Moon, where gravity is
| lighter.
| sacred_numbers wrote:
| Unfortunately I think you're off by an order of
| magnitude. I think it would be 810 Kilojoules, which is
| approximately equivalent to a 1kg lithium-ion battery. Of
| course, you could move thousands of rocks up and down a
| big crater, rather than just one, but it would still be a
| lot of infrastructure for a fairly small amount of energy
| storage.
| sbierwagen wrote:
| Three orders of magnitude*
| napier wrote:
| No need for reliance on batteries. Just use the solar
| generated to process regolith yielding plenty of hydrogen
| and oxygen for energy storage, breathing, rocket fuel and
| additional component elements.
| mlyle wrote:
| > We do have materials which can withstand this environment,
| but how long will they last? How much power can the whole set
| up produce and would it be more than landing the setup's weight
| in solar cells?
|
| Oh, of course this is terrible now. It would have a very, very
| large required scale to come out ahead compared to just
| shipping power or power generation some other way (if this is
| true at any scale). It is also surely not fully baked yet.
|
| On the other hand... it's a notable step towards being able to
| build "big" in space and might be worth doing to learn more
| about the practical aspect even if it's higher risk and more
| costly than shipping a bunch of PV.
|
| The bigger problem is how practical is it to use PV at all on
| much of the moon.
| xt00 wrote:
| I'm sure ULA who has been waiting for years for some engines to
| fly their new rocket is uber excited about this.. /s :-) so maybe
| they will fly Vulcan this year??
| wonderwonder wrote:
| If this works (big if) and they are able to essentially build a
| solar panel factory in a box and if lab grown protein is both
| able to scale and be shipped in a modular structure (big if) they
| have effectively solved or close to solved 2 of the largest
| challenges involved in establishing moon or mars based colonies.
| Food and power. Science fiction is sneaking up on us.
|
| If it can be automated you could essentially launch space craft
| factories that land and build solar panels prior to humans
| arriving. Far fetched but neat to think about. Approaching von
| Neumann probe territory
| px43 wrote:
| There's basically zero carbon on the moon. A ton of it on Mars
| though (lots of CO2 ice).
|
| Our moon is something like 45% silica on the surface. That is a
| _fuckton_ of silicon. Step one is definitely making a solar
| panel factory, and then using that power to smelt aluminum,
| iron, titanium, etc. It seems to me that the moon would make
| for a good floating semiconductor fab, and eventually, data
| center. It would be great for making large structures for
| spacecraft, since the materials are right, and the lower
| gravity makes it much cheaper to get the parts into space.
|
| It doesn't make sense for a _ton_ of people to live there,
| since we would have to bring all of our own carbon, which is
| kind of important for biological life.
| colechristensen wrote:
| >That is a fuckton of silicon.
|
| Not really, silicon is abundant everywhere with rocks. Most
| rocks anywhere are going to be about half silicon, not that
| this is exactly true everywhere but nobody is ever going to
| wonder where they're going to be getting their silicon.
| Vikerchu wrote:
| The problem is that you need to get the silica out of the
| rock or ship to the moon And you need to power the refinery
| and something to to heat it with and co2 airlock and on and
| on.
| colechristensen wrote:
| Oh no the point I'm trying to make is just that any rocky
| planet or moon or whatever is going to be like 10-50%
| silicon right on the surface. It is more or less as
| abundant as is possible to imagine anywhere we can land.
| jacquesm wrote:
| > There's basically zero carbon on the moon.
|
| I can see the end of certain rituals on account of that
| little fact.
| jbattle wrote:
| Assuming abundant power and effective carbon recapture /
| recycling, how much carbon do you need per person? If it was
| on the order of 50 lbs of carbon per person, and that could
| be infinitely recycled, that doesn't seem wildly onerous. It
| looks like the average person exhales about 2 pounds of
| carbon per day, so that's a very rough baseline in terms of
| carbon needs.
|
| Is there a technology available now or soon that can scrub
| carbon out of the ambient air and capture that in an easy to
| reuse medium?
| px43 wrote:
| ~~Yeah, I think carbon recycling can be pretty good.
| They've been doing it on submarines for a while.~~
|
| (edit: nevermind, I was confused about the submarine thing,
| the user "idlewords" below has a lot of good commentary
| about this)
|
| At any given moment, any human is about 18% carbon. Carbon
| is also pretty important in *carbo*hydrates. Any plants
| that we would grow would need a ton of carbon. It can be
| done, but any moon colony will basically always be
| dependent on getting extra carbon from Earth, so it can
| never be "self sufficient" in the way that Mars can
| eventually be.
|
| It is kind of funny that on Earth, we're obsessed with
| capturing and burying as much carbon as possible, when it's
| going to be an incredibly valuable resource on the moon,
| assuming that a bunch of people are gong to want to live
| there.
| idlewords wrote:
| Submarines don't recycle carbon; they capture CO2 and
| vent it.
| rtkwe wrote:
| Mostly because they don't need to retain it though, a sub
| doesn't need to reprocess the CO2 into C and O2 but the
| process can be done. The process is largely the same
| instead of ejecting it as a waste product continue to
| break it down into useful products like injecting it into
| a Sabatier process.
| idlewords wrote:
| The Sabatier reactor on the space station broke after
| processing about a thousand liters of water because
| deodorant and astronaut urine poisoned the catalyst beds.
|
| Everything is easy to do in theory. Recycling carbon in
| practice is very, very hard if you don't have plants to
| help you.
| shagie wrote:
| Hypothetically... after you have separated the carbon
| from the oxygen (discounting the human waste which has a
| significantly more amount of carbon)... what would you do
| with it as part of a recycling process in a submarine?
| rtkwe wrote:
| In current tech not much comes to mine. Maybe it could be
| reprocessed into dry graphite lubricant but there's not
| much need for raw carbon or principally carbon materials
| in a submarine. That's another reason it just gets tossed
| there's just not a real use for it. On a hypothetical
| extraplanetary colony though it's a pretty important
| material just to keep people alive.
| wonderwonder wrote:
| Seems like carbon capture and export to the moon is a
| business that is just short of a billionaire to implement
| it.
| shagie wrote:
| Submarines restock food, some air supplies, and... deal
| with waste.
|
| Food https://youtu.be/bPJUVKizh90
|
| Air https://youtu.be/g3Ud6mHdhlQ (MEA and LIOH for CO2,
| electrolysis and "candles" for oxygen)
|
| Toilet https://youtu.be/SYFuA3xnkUE?t=985
|
| Nothing is "recycled" as such - and certainly not any of
| the carbon (you're not eating the carbon captured from
| MEA or LIOH... or your waste).
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| I'm pretty sure NASA has been reusing carbon on human
| spacecraft since at least the Apollo program.
| idlewords wrote:
| That is not the case; carbon (as CO2) was captured by
| disposable LiOH cartridges through the end of the Shuttle
| program. On the ISS, it's captured on zeolite beds and
| vented into space. Except for a few small-scale plant
| experiments, no space program has demonstrated carbon
| capture and re-use.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| Ah I see, thank you! I figured someone would know better
| than me on this.
| Tuna-Fish wrote:
| > There's basically zero carbon on the moon.
|
| That's a big citation needed.
|
| There is very little carbon on the sites that we have
| studied, but they were all fairly similar equatorial
| locations. CO2 is heavy enough that it doesn't immediately
| escape moon, when some is delivered (for example by a
| meteorite), it will bounce around for a while. If, during
| that time, it hits a really cold surface, it will freeze and
| stay there. Such cold surfaces are available in abundance at
| permanently shadowed craters at the poles, and also inside
| lava tubes.
|
| We have gone a long way since we thought that moon was dry
| and lacked carbon. These days, most of the people studying it
| are fairly confident that every single permanently cold
| crater holds a glacier, composed of mixed ices, mostly water,
| CO2 and methane.
|
| The only element needed for people that we still think that
| the Moon has a shortage of is nitrogen.
| gene-h wrote:
| Lava tubes have been measured to be quite warm[0]. This
| study concludes that "Neither [regolith or PSRs can
| provide] a abundant long-term supply of carbon to support a
| sustainable human presence on the Moon"[1] Although
| permanently shadowed craters are not very well understood.
|
| [0]https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2022
| GL09... [1]https://arxiv.org/pdf/2104.13521.pdf
| Vikerchu wrote:
| Doesn't moon dust give you giga cancer? Well i guess its
| a cave...
| shagie wrote:
| The cave is to reduce the need for cosmic ray and
| micrometeoroid shelter (it's easier to build in a balloon
| in a cave than it is to build on the surface and fortify
| it).
|
| Moon dust is toxic and jagged ( https://www.esa.int/Scien
| ce_Exploration/Human_and_Robotic_Ex... and
| https://www.livescience.com/62590-moon-dust-bad-lungs-
| brain.... ).
|
| > In several lab tests, a single scoop of replica moon
| dust proved toxic enough to kill up to 90 percent of the
| lung and brain cells exposed to it.
| rtkwe wrote:
| There was a decent trillogy from Ian McDonald that featured a
| massive solar furnace that slowly circumnavigated the moon to
| keep in direct sun light that produced the metal for the
| colonies across the moon.
| shagie wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Walk_in_the_Sun_(short_stor
| y...
|
| > The story follows Trish, the sole survivor of a terrible
| crash landing on the Moon. After regaining her senses, she
| contacts Earth and learns that it will be thirty days
| before a rescue mission can reach her. In the meantime, she
| depends on a wing-like solar panel to provide power to her
| suit's recycling facilities, and lunar night is
| approaching.
|
| https://www.baen.com/Chapters/0671878522/0671878522___1.htm
| LarryMullins wrote:
| It would need to move at about 15 km/h at the equator, and
| slower at other latitudes. That's surprisingly reasonable.
| rtkwe wrote:
| In the story I believe they had built rails for it too to
| run on or at least hardened and sintered regolith courses
| to drive through. It's a surprisingly reasonable pace for
| even a huge structure to have access to prime solar
| energy continuously. The series it called Luna if you're
| interested, the social structure is a bit out there but I
| enjoyed them.
| comex wrote:
| With a 2.5 second ping time from the Earth to Moon, data
| centers seem to me like a limited proposition. Sure, there
| are some use cases that could tolerate it, but many that
| can't, and even where tolerating it is technically possible,
| it's annoying enough (e.g. it's hard to use SSH with that
| kind of latency) that there'd need to be significant cost
| savings for anyone to use it. But the cost would depend not
| just on the cost of raw materials but also the enormous cost
| of creating the fabs. On Earth that can be amortized with
| equally enormous production volume; that might be harder on
| the Moon...
| riffic wrote:
| it'd be a nice but expensive storage location though.
| beakergordon wrote:
| If the goal was isolation from natural disasters and the
| like, then why not just build it in a facility like Yucca
| Mountain?
| junipertea wrote:
| Maybe bragging rights. My dog photo collection can
| survive societal collapse.
| dylan604 wrote:
| why would yucca mt be susceptible to societal collapse?
| johnwalkr wrote:
| There's at least a couple of bags of Apollo-era poo on the
| moon.
| superkuh wrote:
| Also basically zero accessible nitrogen.
| TheRealNGenius wrote:
| [dead]
| Teever wrote:
| My personal take on things is that we're far closer to von
| Neumann probe level technology than anyone seems to be aware
| of, and we're just sort of sleep walking into a crazy new
| future.
|
| I wish more people on HN would talk about von Nuemann probes
| and things like seed factories[0] instead of smartphone apps
| and people pooping on the streets of San Francisco.
|
| [0] https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Seed_Factories
| gene-h wrote:
| Making solar cells like this is a nice first step to making
| self replicating machines. Being able to make solar cells is
| especially interesting because these are semiconductor
| devices, so producing control electronics may be possible
| too.
|
| But really what needs to be solved for self-replicating
| machines is determining a way to make actuators. On the Moon
| this is harder due to the difficulty of making bearings and
| gears. Because of vacuum welding making bearings is much more
| difficult. While solid lubricants do exist, it's difficult to
| obtain the materials necessary on the Moon. Traditional
| machining and polishing processes don't work well in a vacuum
| either due to vacuum welding and the inability to use
| lubricant.
|
| If we wish to carry out said processes in a pressurized
| environment we run into another problem: seals. In order to
| make good seals we need elastomers, and elastomers require
| elements such as hydrogen, carbon, and nitrogen which are
| difficult to obtain on the Moon.
| Teever wrote:
| Is the issue with manufacturing bearings in a vacuum or
| operating them in a vacuum?
|
| If it is the former it seems like the solution is as simple
| as building a pressurized manufacturing facility.
| gene-h wrote:
| Both. And again, the issue with a pressurized
| manufacturing facility is making seals.
| Teever wrote:
| Why not make a solid enclosure out of metal and melt a
| hole in it when you need to move material in and out?
| wonderwonder wrote:
| This looks like a good read, thanks for this. I had not heard
| of a seed factory before.
| Teever wrote:
| Yeah, I've tried posting it on HN before but it never
| gained any traction. It is a fascinating read and the
| author is active on reddit[0] and he'll answer any
| questions you have about the book.
|
| I just reposted it[1], Let's see if it gets some comments
| this time.
|
| [0] https://www.reddit.com/user/danielravennest [1]
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34795006
| idlewords wrote:
| The second technology you mention is a bit of a non sequitur.
| What lab grown protein, shipped where? Right now there is no
| nutritionally complete food of any kind that is shelf-stable
| for three years; it's a major open problem in long-duration
| space flight.
| wonderwonder wrote:
| Food, power, shelter and air are essentially the big issues
| for space colonization. With the lab protein I was speaking
| of the possibility of shipping a close to self sustaining bio
| reactor in a box to a colony to solve for the food issue. I
| mentioned this as it's an evolving technology that may be
| closer to prime time at the same time as the solar panels
| concept the article mentioned.
| outworlder wrote:
| > I mentioned this as it's an evolving technology that may
| be closer to prime time
|
| Unlikely. We have yet to master nutrition when it comes
| from plants, it will be even worse for a bioreactor.
| Unfortunately, the list of food ingredients that you see
| listed in minimum recommended intake values is woefully
| incomplete. There's a whole bunch of micronutrients we get
| from food that are difficult to replicate.
|
| Bioreactors could be useful for making supplements (say,
| Omega-3) to offset specific deficiencies.
| outworlder wrote:
| And even if we did have nutritionally stable food for this
| long, there's a growing amount of evidence that even just
| mechanical food processing is enough to make it _unhealthy_ -
| if it comprises the majority of your consumption - and that
| it causes metabolic problems (irrespective of additives). And
| that's on Earth.
|
| If we are to eat just processed food in space, we'll need a
| lot more research on this. It would be better if we just grew
| food from plants.
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8747021/
| panick21_ wrote:
| There is also a cool idea about building robots that use things
| like ice to build themselves bodies and can build versions of
| themselves.
|
| You likely still have to send along a whole lot of electronics
| pars because making those on the spot would be difficult.
| Vikerchu wrote:
| Fusion\fission refining? ??????
| chairhairair wrote:
| Yes making ice-based self-replicating robots is
| "difficult"...
| panick21_ wrote:
| We are also don't have much real research into actually
| trying it. And it doesn't have to all the way self-
| replicating. It more like using local materials to build
| the heavy parts of robots. Maybe those robots then couldn't
| build another one of themselves.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Unless space ice has mechanical properties comparable to
| steel, I don't see the point in even trying...
| dotnet00 wrote:
| While ice is a somewhat extreme example, the idea of
| bringing over the electronics and using local materials
| to put together whatever structural components are needed
| isn't that crazy. It'd save a lot of mass, and things
| like 3d printers can produce them with reasonable
| precision. There already is a decent amount of research
| into the prospect of 3d printing structures with Lunar or
| Martian regolith, so structural components for robots or
| machines don't seem too crazy.
| panick21_ wrote:
| I don't remember the details and I don't remember the
| exact place where I have heard and interview with
| somebody that works on this stuff.
|
| They wouldn't use pure ice. But in cold places, with ice
| mixed with some other materials you can actually make
| quite good materials. Consider that in most places
| gravity is much lower then on earth so it doesn't need to
| be carbon fiber to be useful.
| hef19898 wrote:
| I said steel, not carbon fibre. And even in zero-g things
| still have mass to them that needs to be handled, don't
| they?
| panick21_ wrote:
| I know what you said, I just used carbon fibre to make a
| point is. You don't always need the best materials to
| have something useful.
|
| Yes things still have mass but if you are building a
| robot that moves around there is a big difference in what
| kind of quality structural materials you need for the
| robot to be viable.
|
| Part of the research that would go into such project
| would be to look at what local resources are, and how to
| make them into useful materials. For example, using ice
| in combination with some filler material has been shown
| to be quite usable in cold temperatures.
|
| The exact materials you would use depend on where you
| would want to use this kind of system. Maybe in the far
| future these kind of system would look around to analyses
| the environment and make smart choices about what
| materials to use to build themselves.
| 14 wrote:
| I too thought this is like something out of Star Trek how
| amazing would this be if it indeed works.
| gene-h wrote:
| The approach they develop likely doesn't work on Mars. They
| rely on the ambient high vacuum environment of the Moon as part
| of the silicon purification step and likely for deposition of
| the solar cells. Mars is not high vacuum.
| panick21_ wrote:
| I listen to a podcast by somebody that works for a company
| that does this kind of thing. I think he said Mars atmo is so
| thin that many things actually work quite well based on their
| calculation, but it does lead to problems in some situations.
| [deleted]
| t43562 wrote:
| Science fiction becoming reality. By the time it's in use on the
| moon nobody will be amazed by it. The same way nobody is amazed
| to hold a tiny world-communicator in their hand and communicate
| with people on the other side of the planet by video.
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