Line her up.
Seems about right.
You guys good to go?
Alright, shields up.
To be a space miner, there are a couple things you might need: the sun, some lunar soil,
and a pretty powerful mirror.
We’re trying to get the perfect angle with the fresnel lens in order to focus the light
down.
We’re getting 300 suns worth of energy at that very small spot and that’s what’s
allowing us to melt this regolith.
There we go.
Yeah, we’re melting now.
There we go, it’s cooking.
The eventual goal is to take the water from the lunar poles and turn that directly into
rocket fuel.
But the goal in between then is going to be this.
We’re going to take moon dust, moon rocks that have no water in them but do have oxygen
in them, and split the oxygen from everything else that’s inside the moon dust, pull the
oxygen out, and use that with hydrogen that’s brought from Earth, to make rocket fuel.
So that’s going to allow us to bootstrap into getting to the rest of the solar system,
building up bigger bases, supplying oxygen for the colonists, as well as the rockets.
There has never been energy and commitment like there is now for living off the land.
Mining for resources on the moon is no longer the subject of science fiction and artistic
renditions.
It’s becoming a central focus for the space industry today.
And a key technique that’ll help make this whole vision possible is of course, hidden
in an acronym.
We talk a lot about in situ resource utilization or ISRU.
So what that means is taking the resources or the building blocks that are already in
space and using them for our own needs so that you don't need to launch it from Earth.
The exciting thing about space resources, is that they're not a destination.
It will give us the knowledge that we need to go further.
The roadmap to a future propellant depot starts with testing out robotic sampling and drilling
systems.
And that’s where Honeybee Robotics comes in.
They’re a team of space engineers who are just as busy as their company name would lead
you to believe.
We have at least 50 projects going on at any given time.
Honeybee’s technology is very transferable to different types of missions, mostly because
we work really hard to make drills and sampling systems that can survive just about any space
environment.
Coming up in the 2020s, two of their instruments will fly on commercial lunar landers to demonstrate
early stage ISRU techniques.
PlanetVac is one of our prides and joy.
It's basically a reverse vacuum.
You blow to agitate the regolith.
And that creates a pressure difference between the foot and the collection chamber on the
lander.
So that creates a flow of material.
And then we have another little blower to make sure it goes in the right direction.
It's so lightweight that it can really attach just about anywhere.
And it has what looks like a little foot that hangs off the side.
It's a great addition to any spacecraft.
And this one LISTER, will measure thermal conductivity on the Moon.
Both of these instruments, along with various other payloads from universities and companies
tapped by NASA, will give scientists foundational data about the Moon’s terrain before we
start mining for water.
And roving over at the Colorado School of Mines is another project that wants to go
lunar prospecting.
We are currently in the Earth Mechanics Institute at the Colorado School of Mines.
They've been studying how to drill, prospect, excavate and use resources for over a hundred
years.
This is where we test out MAAP.
His suspension, his drive train, LIDAR, cameras.
And it allows us to quickly iterate on our design.
Onboard MAAP, there is a near infrared spectrometer and a scanning mass spectrometer and you have
a 10 centimeter drill.
Plus, a video game controller to steer MAAP through the turns on the testbed.
We're starting to see a shift in the industry from totally human controlled robotics to
autonomous missions.
The future of MAAP is to have swarms of prospectors on the lunar surface looking for resources
of interest.
It's not sustainable to have 60 people sitting in a room directing one robot.
So what we're trying to do is redirect that focus.
So, that one person directs a team of robots.
Before we build a refueling station on the moon, we need these robot prospectors to suss
out the best mining sites for us first.
And once we know what’s there and where to dig, then we can take on the next challenge.
In order to extract the resource, you first have to focus on what it is you want to extract.
And actually there's two camps.
Some people say, let's go after the water.
Why?
Because water will give you immediately hydrogen and oxygen, you've got your propellant.
Some say, well, it's hard to get to those permanently shadowed regions on the poles.
Why not get the oxygen?
It's 80-83% of the propellant that you need.
And that is what Hunter Williams is working on at Honeybee Robotics.
This is what it’s going to look like extracting oxygen from a lunar sample.
So we’d have a small reactor, that’s that metal part on the inside.
We’d have some kind of element to heat up a spot in that reactor.
So the first technology we’ll probably use is concentrated solar.
You take the sunlight and you squeeze it down to the part right in the middle there, and
then once the melt pool gets going, once it turns into lava, then we turn on those two
electrodes that are inside the reactor and it starts pulling apart the metals from the
oxygen.
So we’d have some kind of loose seal around the outside, and we’d be keeping a more
or less low pressure and slowly drawing the oxygen out of the system.
The biggest issue in the past with space resources is that it’s been too risky but what we’re
doing here is, we’re lowering the risk of space missions by providing the astronauts
with something they can use there.
In case of emergency, there’s your oxygen.
In case you need to get off the moon really quickly and there’s no resupply vessel coming,
you’re fine, you’ve got a cache of oxygen right here.
This will be the first type of technology that’s going to be used on the moon to really
live off the land.
So we start here, and we move on later to collecting ice and use that to get to the
rest of the solar system.
Depending on what the robot prospectors discover when they hunt for ice water on the Moon,
experts are looking into two different techniques to extract it.
The one we think would be highly successful is what we call the planetary volatile extractor.
We drill down and then heat the core downhole.
So there's embedded heaters on the inside of the coring string.
And that forces the volatiles to sublimate and go up the middle of the drill string.
And you could think about having an array of these PVExs and then going on a rover over
like a football field and just going and collecting large amounts of water.
Over at the Colorado School of Mines, Angel and his team are exploring a thermal mining
technique to capture lunar ice.
The water may be ice as hard as a rock.
I may have to start drilling using a lot of excavators, that becomes hard.
Solar power can be collected and beamed down and the water can be transformed from ice
to vapor.
It's called sublimation.
So, if I can do that, now I have this gas, it goes out and I can trap it with a cold
surface, and it becomes ice again.
This is a totally new technique that we don't use on Earth.
This is where you start thinking in very innovative ways in a different environment.
And then once you’ve got that water ice extracted from the Moon’s poles...
We’re going to gather it up, and then we’re going to put some electricity to it.
So just as simple as you can see right here, I am splitting hydrogen and oxygen in this
water.
That’s how simple electrolysis is.
If now a rocket lands, and you have a line for hydrogen and a line for oxygen, you refuel
the rocket and then you ignite them, and then you have a powerful rocket going up which
products are water.
What excites me the most about the future of space resources is the fact that it enables
a sustainable presence in space.
And what that means is truly having an outpost on the moon that people work and live.
And none of that is possible without the use of space resources.
It’s an entirely new zeitgeist, it’s a totally new way of looking at space then what
we’ve been doing in the past I don’t know five decades.
It has been so challenging that it pushes us to develop technologies that we never thought
we were going to use and that's what the space program did.
It pushed our edge on every single engineering discipline.
Things have gone from being entirely theoretical from a group of old guys who were not getting
listened to saying this is possible, we can really live off the land.
We’ve gone from those guys being seen as fringe elements to being listened to.
Companies as big as SpaceX and Blue Origin and as small as Lunar Outpost are really trying
to build up the technology to make this possible.
It's like sailing a ship across the world.
We have to sail out there.
We have to just explore and draw ourselves a whole new map.
My favorite example of like space redneck engineering is the invention of the microwave
oven.
Originally, they were doing all of this very secret, very big brained radar testing in
I think it was WWII, but...one of the technicians who was setting up the radar range was working
and he had a chocolate bar in his pocket and it started melting due to the radar going
off and he thought to himself, hey, I can take this technology that we’re using for
space stuff and cook my hot pockets with it.
So, it’s very similar to what we’re doing here.
Because we’re taking what used to be very big technology in the 1880s of electrolysis
and we’re taking the lenses from a lighthouse and turning them sideways, and focusing light
down rather than focusing light outwards to melt the dirt, combining these two processes
and turning it into a new space technology.