
Originally Posted by
Wild Cobra

Originally Posted by
kojax
Maybe we could split the difference and just bring hydrogen up there, then extract the oxygen from moon rocks. There's no shortage of oxygen, just hydrogen. The regolith that covers the surface is made primarily out of Silicon Dioxide, so the main trick to getting oxygen is finding a way to separate it out.
Why not just capture the solar wind, which is mostly single protons? That means hydrogen!
As for making oxygen, just use electrolytic reduction and make oxygen and aluminum at the same time.
these are concepts several decades old.
Apparently, the solar wind is pretty sparse.
http://pluto.space.swri.edu/image/gl...olar_wind.html

Originally Posted by
Site
The solar wind is the supersonic outflow into interplanetary space of plasma from the Sun's corona, the region of the solar atmosphere beginning about 4000 km above the Sun's visible surface and extending several solar radii into space. It is composed of approximately equal numbers of ions and electrons; the ion component consists predominantly of protons (95%), with a small amount of doubly ionized helium and trace amounts of heavier ions. Embedded in the outflowing solar wind plasma is a weak magnetic field known as the interplanetary magnetic field (IMF). The solar wind varies--in density, velocity, temperature, and magnetic field properties--with the solar cycle, heliographic latitude, heliocentric distance, and rotational period. It also varies in response to shocks, waves, and turbulence that perturb the interplanetary flow. Average values for solar wind velocity, density, and magnetic field strength at the orbit of the Earth are 468 km per second; density, 8.7 protons per cubic centimeter, and 6.6 nT, respectively.
So, 8.7 protons (Hydrogen+ ions) per cubic centimeter. Unfortunately, every site I can find seems to want to give the number in cubic centimeters, so we'll have to use the other numbers to tell us how many a collector might collect.
So, at 468 km/second, that means 46,800,000 centimeters per second. If your catching device were 1 meter squared (10,000 centimeters total area), then the number of protons that would strike it per second would be:
46,800,000 * 10,000 * 8.7 = 4,071,600,000,000 or 4.0716 * 10 ^ 12
A a mole of hydrogen atoms is one gram, and consists of 6.0221415×10^23 atoms. So.... basically it would take more than a billion seconds to collect one gram of hydrogen.