Space Vet Calls for Lunar Industries

　　Dennis Wingo is a good kind of rocket man. He wants to build space vehicles and robots to colonize the moon not for human outposts or science, but for industry.

　　A veteran developer of systems for space, Wingo sees a wide variety of opportunities to make money on the moon. They include harvesting rare metals and using the near-vacuum of space to make strong alloys and space vehicles.

　　“The first industries we will start there are metals. We also imagine communications stations and telescopes, but there is no silver bullet — no one thing will make it economically viable,” Wingo said in a talk hosted by the IEEE Consultants' Network of Silicon Valley.

　　The moon is largely made up of metal oxides that could yield new supplies of platinum — perhaps enough to drive prices for the precious metal down to $300 from $1,400 an ounce today.

　　“You have to chemically process a ton of earth to get an ounce of platinum, but on the moon you don’t need chemicals, just different levels of heat to make different metals...[with cheaper platinum] the internal combustion engine would be gone in a few years, because fuel cells that are so much more efficient” would be cost competitive, he said.

　　Today’s super-strength metal alloys including all jet turbines use at some stage of other development vacuum processes that would be cheaper to handle on the moon, he added.

　　As chief executive of Skycorp, Wingo is currently bidding on a project to make satellites on the International Space Station. He sees even greater opportunities making vehicles using moon metals as materials in 3D printers.

　　“They found mountains of aluminum oxide, and billions of tons of meteor metals on the moon. Some of the metals have nicely-sized grains to feed into 3D printers. I could print a blade for bulldozer on the moon, I can make rover parts and buildings,” Wingo said.

　　“You can build things cheaper and easier in space. We can build large structures for geostationary satellites — these are things people write checks for today,” he added.

　　Looking further afield, Wingo imagines governments commissioning data centers on the moon linked with laser communications that keep data safe in the event of a nuclear war. He even foresees small space fabs for semiconductors.

　　Silicon-28 could be cost effectively purified on the moon and used to make chips with 400-percent higher thermal conductivity than the silicon mixtures used on Earth, he said. A six-inch wafer fab could make larger chips than are viable on Earth, he said.

　　In communications, the International Telecommunications Union is now creating a new region for deep space. Unencumbered by Earth-bound regulations it could “really open up what engineers can do with high powered radios,” enabling robot swarms managed by ultrawideband links that offer higher position accuracy than GPS, he said.

　　Wingo believes solar energy is the most economical power source for lunar operations. He selected what he believes is the best spot to start development — a 500-meter long slice of land near the lunar north pole on a ridge of the Whipple crater that gets more the twice the sunlight as areas near the lunar equator.

　　He used digital images from U.S. lunar orbiters to find the site. They along with orbiters sent by the EU, India and Japan have “dramatically improved” knowledge of the moon’s terrain.

　　Skycorp created a concept for a lunar lander with 80 kW fuel cell tanks that could provide more than 700 hours of power for ground operations. The vehicle’s cells could scavenge hydrogen and oxygen on the moon to provide standard 110/220/440 V AC power.

　　Wingo estimates five to seven of the power vehicles would be needed to keep an industrial outpost self-sufficient. The lander is designed to ride on a Delta IVH or SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket.

　　Studies of the 806 pounds of moon rocks brought back from Apollo missions have helped define the moon’s makeup. For example, Wingo said colonists could create meter-thick basalt roads by applying a microwave emitter to moon rocks.

　　The finding came from one enterprising engineer who put some moon dust in a standard microwave oven. He found it quickly jumped to extremely high temperatures, effectively sintering the material.