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green mining, lunar - August 02, 2021

Masten develops Rocket Mining System to extract lunar water

The American company Masten Space Systems has presented a plan for the extraction of ice on the Moon within the framework of NASA’s Break the Ice Challenge. The company has developed a Rocket Mining System called ROCKET M (Resource Ore Concentrator using Kinetic Energy Targeted Mining) that uses an enclosed rocket engine and vacuum system to harvest water ice from the lunar surface. Designed in collaboration with Honeybee Robotics and Lunar Outpost, the new Rocket Minning System can rapidly extract frozen volatiles from the Moon. This method disrupts lunar soil with a series of rocket plumes that fluidize ice regolith by...

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lunar, refueling, starship - August 02, 2021

Jeff Greenblatt - Refueling SpaceX Starship with methane/oxygen - 2020 Lunar Development Conference

Speaker: Jeff Greenblatt, Founder and CEO at Emerging Futures, LLC Presentation Info: Refueling Starship with methane/oxygen propellant on the lunar surface using polar volatiles As the evidence for water in the lunar polar crater regions has accumulated, exploration and business plans have moved to embrace water ice mining as an important early activity on the Moon, providing hydrogen/oxygen propellant for return missions and surface operations, life support, radiation shielding and consumables for industrial processes. However, absent from most analysis but clearly present in the LCROSS/LAMP impactor measurements at Cabeus crater were other volatiles besides water, including carbon-, nitrogen-,...

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