The goal of Artemis is to establish a sustained presence on the Moon. To achieve so, numerous resources are necessary. The Moon contains several essential elements needed to sustain human presence. Most of those elements are trapped in the form of minerals. To refine those minerals into useful materials, reduction methods are needed. Most reduction methods on Earth require large amounts of mass and power which is unrealistic for early stages of building a lunar base. To solve this problem, we are developing a concept of Lunar In-Situ Aluminum Production through Molten Salt Electrolysis (LISAP-MSE).

The LISAP-MSE project, if successful, will demonstrate the use of the Fray-Farthing-Chen (FFC) Cambridge process to reduce aluminum oxide (i.e., alumina) into aluminum and oxygen gas via electrolysis in a molten salt bath for the production of aluminum on the Moon. It will be shown that with a steady supply of hydrogen chloride, this in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) method can supply almost all of the necessary materials consumed in the FFC Cambridge process (except hydrogen chloride) to produce aluminum metal, oxygen, water, and silica from anorthite. This project is designed to answer the call from the BIG Ideas Challenge 2023 (Lunar Forge), and will leverage an ongoing Lunar Surface Technology Research (LuSTR) project titled “Regolith Beneficiation System for Production of Lunar Calcium and Aluminum” underway at Missouri S&T, which is developing systems to beneficiate anorthite from lunar regolith particles with the promising potential to provide enriched anorthite to the LISAP-MSE process.

Once sourced and constructed, the LISAP-MSE apparatus will be characterized and calibrated in an atmospheric pressure setting before being tested inside vacuum chambers. These testing conditions include under atmospheric pressure to be conducted at a foundry laboratory, and under vacuum conditions inside two vacuum chambers, one induction chamber and one thermal chamber, all located on site at Missouri S&T.

Once testing is completed, the end product will be characterized using a handheld X-ray fluorescence (XRF) analyzer along with density tests to verify the elemental composition. Following the XRF analysis is a set of density tests that will be compared to the densities of pure aluminum and pure alumina. This will help determine the amount of aluminum produced, and thus assess the efficiency of conversion. Mainly driven by chemical reactions, the LISAP-MSE process is massively scalable allowing for a smooth transition from testing phase to batch production. This aluminum can be used to construct habitats and infrastructure for a lunar base which can potentially support a sustained human presence on the Moon.