The ROxygen Project: Outpost-Scale Lunar Oxygen Production System Development at Johnson Space Center

Lee, Kristopher A.; Oryshchyn, Lara; Paz, Aaron; Reddington, Mike; Simon, Thomas

doi:10.1061/(asce)as.1943-5525.0000230

Cited by 23 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 4 publications

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“…Those that exist have largely been the work of NASA (e.g. Sanders and Larson, 2011;Sanders and Larson, 2013;Lee et al, 2013), namely the field trials of the ROxygen and PILOT projects.…”

Section: Journal Pre-proofmentioning

confidence: 99%

A universal framework for Space Resource Utilisation (SRU)

Hadler

Martín

Cilliers

et al. 2020

Planetary and Space Science

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This is a PDF file of an article that has undergone enhancements after acceptance, such as the addition of a cover page and metadata, and formatting for readability, but it is not yet the definitive version of record. This version will undergo additional copyediting, typesetting and review before it is published in its final form, but we are providing this version to give early visibility of the article. Please note that, during the production process, errors may be discovered which could affect the content, and all legal disclaimers that apply to the journal pertain.

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“…Those that exist have largely been the work of NASA (e.g. Sanders and Larson, 2011;Sanders and Larson, 2013;Lee et al, 2013), namely the field trials of the ROxygen and PILOT projects.…”

Section: Journal Pre-proofmentioning

confidence: 99%

A universal framework for Space Resource Utilisation (SRU)

Hadler

Martín

Cilliers

et al. 2020

Planetary and Space Science

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…While over 20 technologies have been proposed for this step (Taylor and Carrier, 1993), the four main contenders being considered by NASA and ESA are (in order of increasing oxygen yield): Hydrogen reduction of ilmenite (<2% yield; Lee, 2013); carbothermal reduction of silicates and iron oxides (~10% yield; Muscatello and Gustafson, 2010); molten regolith electrolysis (estimated to be 20-40% yield, Schreiner, 2015); and, molten salt electrolysis, also known as the FFC Cambridge process (up to 100% recovery; Schwandt et al, 2012). Of these technologies, hydrogen reduction has received the most attention, and its working principles are well-characterised.…”

Section: Oxygen Production From Lunar Regolithmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In a recent and comprehensive report, Kornuta et al (2019) estimated that the demand for lunar water could be as much as 2450 t/y, including water required on the lunar surface (150 t/y), for fuelling missions to Mars (180 t/y) and for transporting propellant to LEO (1880 t/y). Furthermore, it is reported that 1000 kg O2 will be required per year for life-support purposes on the Moon (Lee, Oryshchyn et al 2013). In order to design suitable technologies and processes for producing a given target quantity of oxygen, the scale of the regolith mining and oxygen extraction operations must be established.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…While the use-and business cases for lunar SRU have been well-considered, the scale of mining operations required to produce the projected amount of oxygen (1000 kg/y, following Lee, Oryshchyn et al, 2013) has received less attention. The scale of operations is critical as this defines the technology and scheduling requirements of the whole process, for example whether to operate on a continuous basis or a batch basis.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Estimating the scale of Space Resource Utilisation (SRU) operations to satisfy lunar oxygen demand

Cilliers

Rasera

Hadler

2020

Planetary and Space Science

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The production of oxygen from lunar regolith is analogous to metal production from ore in a terrestrial mine. The process flowsheets both include excavation, haulage and beneficiation of the regolith or ore to provide the feedstock for the chemical extraction of oxygen or metal. The production rate of oxygen depends on the mass rate of regolith treated and the efficiency of converting the regolith to oxygen. To date, the development of Space Resource Utilisation (SRU) has been concerned with the technological development of the process, particularly the excavation and oxygen extraction. However, the required operating mass rates of the mine operation and the oxygen extraction stage have not been considered in any great detail.Previous estimates of mining scale for lunar oxygen production are reviewed, and converted to a comparable regolith mining rate of kg/h. Beneficiation of the regolith before oxygen extraction is considered, and the effects of pre-sizing and removal of a specific component, agglutinates, are considered. The oxygen yield and operational availability are also included. It is estimated that the minimum mining rate to produce 1000 kg of oxygen per annum is at least five times higher than previous estimates, 30 kg/h, for equivalent efficiency assumptions. 2Monte-Carlo simulations were performed for statistical confidence in the estimates of the mining mass rate and the required oxygen extraction feedstock rate. To be 95% confident that the kg/y O2 will be met, the designed mining rate should be at least 65 kg/h, and the beneficiated feedstock rate 16 kg/h. This study has revised and increased the estimate of the lunar regolith mining scale required for the production of a given amount of oxygen. It has also estimated the mass rate of feedstock required for oxygen extraction, if the regolith is first beneficiated.The findings have a significant impact on the practical implementation of lunar mining and oxygen extraction, particularly the process design and whether the operation will be by batch-or continuous processing. The mass scale and beneficiation approaches bring terrestrial mining and processing concepts to SRU, and for the first time estimates the effect that regolith beneficiation and uncertainty have on the estimated scale of both the mining and extraction operations.

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“…Multiple studies have been done focusing on the chemical processes of ISRU reactor and system productivity. Both NASA [2] and Lockheed Martin [3] built their testbeds to evaluate the performance of the hydrogen reduction reaction to extract oxygen from regolith. Orbitec Inc.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Multi-Fidelity Space Mission Planning and Space Infrastructure Design Framework for Space Resource Logistics

Chen

Jonchay

Hou

et al. 2019

AIAA Propulsion and Energy 2019 Forum

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To build a sustainable and affordable space transportation system for human space exploration, the design and deployment of space infrastructures are critical; one attractive and promising infrastructure system is the in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) system. The design analysis and trade studies for ISRU systems require the consideration of not only the design of the ISRU plant itself but also other infrastructure systems (e.g., storage, power) and various ISRU architecture options (e.g., resource, location, technology). This paper proposes a system-level space infrastructure and its logistics design optimization framework to perform architecture trade studies. A new space infrastructure logistics optimization problem formulation is proposed that considers infrastructure subsystems' internal interactions and their external synergistic effects with space logistics simultaneously. Since the full-size version of this proposed problem formulation can be computationally prohibitive, a new multi-fidelity optimization formulation is developed by varying the granularity of the commodity type definition over the network graph; this multi-fidelity formulation can find an approximation solution to the full-size problem computationally efficiently with little sacrifice in the solution quality. The proposed problem formulation and method are applied to a multi-mission lunar exploration campaign to demonstrate their values.

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The ROxygen Project: Outpost-Scale Lunar Oxygen Production System Development at Johnson Space Center

Cited by 23 publications

References 4 publications

A universal framework for Space Resource Utilisation (SRU)

A universal framework for Space Resource Utilisation (SRU)

Estimating the scale of Space Resource Utilisation (SRU) operations to satisfy lunar oxygen demand

Multi-Fidelity Space Mission Planning and Space Infrastructure Design Framework for Space Resource Logistics

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