Engineering Commons^™

Lunar In-Situ Aluminum Production Through Molten Salt Electrolysis (Lisap-Mse), Jacob Ortega, Jeffrey D. Smith, Fateme Rezaei, David Bayless, William P. Schonberg, Daniel S. Stutts, Daoru Frank Han

NASA-Missouri Space Grant Consortium

The goal of Artemis is to establish a sustained presence on the Moon. To achieve so, numerous resources are necessary. The Moon contains several essential elements needed to sustain human presence. Most of those elements are trapped in the form of minerals. To refine those minerals into useful materials, reduction methods are needed. Most reduction methods on Earth require large amounts of mass and power which is unrealistic for early stages of building a lunar base. To solve this problem, we are developing a concept of Lunar In-Situ Aluminum Production through Molten Salt Electrolysis (LISAP-MSE).

The LISAP-MSE project, if successful, …