SA man makes moon magic

2004-12-14 16:50

Tisha Steyn

Cape Town - A South African chemical engineer has come up with a way to produce liquid oxygen from lunar rock.

This process would make it feasible to establish permanent manned bases on the moon sometime in the future.

US space agency Nasa has made available R82m to further develop the process devised by Shaan Oosthuizen, 28, who works for British Titanium in Cambridge.

Oosthuizen is a co-inventor of the Ilmenox process, named after the process' ability to produce oxygen from the lunar mineral ilmenite.

The process exctracts oxygen from moonrock, which are metal-oxides that may contain up to 30 or 40% oxygen.

By means of electro-chemical equipment, which has now been patented, the oxygen and the metal in the moonrock are split.

Oosthuizen said sand samples from Namakwa Sands has successfully been used in experiments to produce titanium metal and potentially oxygen.

"Apollo missions have shown that the relevant minerals found on the moon are notably similar to those found on earth, and it is not necessary to bring lunar rock home to experiment with."

The Nasa funding would be used over the next four years to develop equipment for the viable processing of lunar rock, with the aim to produce rocket propellant on the moon on a large scale.

Oxygen extracted in this way could, for instance, be remixed with hydrogen to form water, and eventually it might be viable to support sustained exploration of the moon.

Oosthuizen expected to work "on both sides of the Atlantic" on the process, as some of his research would be done at a Nasa base in the US.

- News24