When NASA sets up its permanent base on the moon, how will the colonists keep themselves going? How will they get oxygen to breathe, and where will they find building materials, not to mention silicon for all the solar panels they will need?
Easy, says Geoffrey Landis of NASA's Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio. All these materials can be made from moon dust.
Landis's plan is to use just one chemical shipped from Earth - potassium fluoride, in crystal form - to extract a range of useful materials from the "regolith" that makes up the moon's surface.
In 2005 NASA launched the Moon Regolith Oxygen challenge to spark research into extracting oxygen from this lunar soil (New Scientist, 28 May 2005, p 6). Landis sees the fine, grey powder as having much more potential than that, however.
Regolith locks up silicon, iron, aluminium and at least seven other metals ...
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