Item — HN Reader

Excerpt: "NASA had offered a quarter-million-dollar prize to the first research team that could figure out how to extract oxygen from the moon’s surface, a precondition for establishing lunar bases. Sadoway proposed using an electrolytic cell—which produces an electric current to break down compounds—to extract oxygen from lunar rocks. The by-product was molten metal, a realization that led him to explore the possibility of using a similar approach to process metals back on Earth."

Two for the price of one! (Well, potential solutions to problems that is! One, how to generate oxygen on other planets, and two, how to smelt metals on this one while generating less carbon emissions. Well played!)

3 comments

Interestingly, this is exactly the process used in Andy Weir's new novel Artemis and makes oxygen the least of the problems of the moon city that the novel is named after.

I highly recommend the audio book version read by Rosario Dawson.

Another good example of how investing in NASA helps our economy by facilitating the discovery of new technology.

Government intervention. Not good. Much better would be letting free markets to allocate more resources to figure out how to get people clicking more ads and development of cryptocurrencies.

(This was sarcasm.)

While I generally agree, the free market did give us the likes of Tesla and SpaceX. The optimal strategy is to allow both.

The amount of government subsidies to both those companies has been staggering. Neither of those are free market stories.

And it took nearly 50 years before a company dared to get into that market.

Has the government "subsidized" SpaceX? AFAIK the government has been a consistent customer of SpaceX and they've leased facilities from NASA but it seems that overall they aren't being subsidized but rather patronized.

You are aware than the government pays SpaceX more than market price right? The difference is itemized as "additional checks", but it's subsidies in anything but name.

It's not just metals you can smelt, you can also smelt silicon from rocks. It ends up in a melt of iron and silicon, but one could potentially separate out the silicon and use it to make solar cells.[0] Which can then be used to power more electrolysis units to make more solar cells. [0]https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/200501...

And paperclips.

Well everything gets turned into paperclips eventually...