Building Lunar Landing Pads and Producing Oxygen on the Moon

Ethos Space Resources, a space startup, has recently emerged from stealth mode, focusing on producing resources from lunar dust. Specifically, they aim to create landing pads out of lunar regolith and extract oxygen, which is released during the dust processing. To industrialise the Moon, construct lunar bases, and facilitate living and working there, resources and energy are needed. The concept is to source these directly from the Moon rather than transporting them from Earth. We will examine the technology Ethos plans to use, review their milestones to date, and discuss upcoming events for the company. Let’s first consider why producing resources on the Moon is preferable to shipping them from Earth. The challenge with transporting materials from Earth lies in overcoming the planet’s substantial gravity well to reach Low Earth Orbit (LEO). The delta-v, or change in velocity required, is approximately 9.3 to 10 km/s, depending on various factors like launch site and gravity losses. This means accelerating a payload to speeds of 9 or 10 km per second, which consumes a tremendous amount of fuel. After reaching LEO, further manoeuvres are needed to achieve lunar orbit injection, enter into a low lunar orbit, and finally land on the Moon. Depending on the specifics of the mission profile, the total delta-v from Earth’s surface to the Moon’s surface could be between 15 to 16 km/s. This highlights the efficiency of producing resource on the Moon directly, bypassing the need for extensive and costly launches from Earth. Ethos’s plans are to service commercial and government customers on the Moon. Currently, Ethos employs 14 individuals. The company is in its pre-seed funding stage, having secured $250,000 to date. Okay, let’s take a look at the technology they will be using to build landing pads and extract oxygen from moon dust. Lunar dust, or regolith, contains approximately 45% oxygen by weight. Followed in descending order with 20% Silicon, 10 to 15% Iron, with smaller amounts of Calcium, Aluminium, Magnesium and various other elements. The Oxygen is bound up in chemical bonds and requires heating to break the chemical bonds for capture and use. Their first use case is building landing pads. Ethos are designing and developing the processes to construct lunar pads for rockets to land and relaunch. They envision these pads will be constructed from building materials processed from lunar regolith. “We are starting with the very first infrastructure on the Moon, which is a landing pad, making round trip access to the Moon reliable and affordable,” Centers told the Payload website. “We will build the pad and liquid oxygen from the lunar regolith to provide a place to land.” The process of transforming lunar rocks into building materials involves heating them to the point of melting. Upon cooling and solidifying, the lunar dust forms a durable, concrete-like substance ideal for creating landing and launch pads, according to the company. During this melting phase, chemicals within the regolith are released, which can then be electrolysed to isolate oxygen. This extracted oxygen is captured, liquefied and stored in a cryocooler. This liquid oxygen is perfect for use as rocket propellant. The only resource required for this operation is electricity. The second use case is rocket propellant. Ethos plans to construct and operate infrastructure needed for refuelling rockets on the Moon. Liquid oxygen can be extracted from lunar dust and rocks, providing 80% of the propellant mass for spaceflight. While Ethos primarily focuses on its use as rocket fuel, the oxygen could also be vital for life support systems, and potentially for use in fuel cells for energy storage, although these applications are not explicitly mentioned by Ethos. Is there a need for lunar propellant? Astronauts don’t only want to go to the Moon, they want to return safely back to Earth. This requires landers to have sufficient fuel not only for landing on the Moon but also for liftoff and rendezvous with a spacecraft that will bring them back. If a lunar lander could refuel on the Moon that could substantially improve the payload it can deliver and return. For example, a single Starship Human Landing System (HLS) vehicle might need over ten refuelling sessions in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) to ensure it has enough propellant for the complete journey, underscoring the advantages of sourcing fuel directly from the Moon. “Mass to the Moon is almost prohibitively expensive right now,” said Centers. “When you’re doing a round trip mass, that’s even more expensive because you have to bring all the fuel to get back to Earth afterward.” Let’s look at some numbers to make the problem clearer: Starship second stage dry mass is ~100T…but holds ~1,200 metric tons of propellant, according to public estimates. Since Starship’s Raptor engines consume an estimated ~20% methane and ~80% liquid oxygen, LOX propellant is nearly a 1000T which is 10 times the dry mass of the ship. Producing LOX from lunar rocks could, in theory, makes refuelling a lot easier and potentially cheaper. “It is orders of magnitude cheaper to build infrastructure on the Moon using local resources,” said Centers. Let’s look at the milestones of Ethos Space Resources so far. As a young company in the pre-seed phase they don’t have any tech on the Moon yet. But they have achieved a few milestones already. Let’s go over them now. Concrete-like Rock Produced in a Lunar Environment Ethos has successfully produced the concrete-like rock in a $2M simulated lunar environment, and has tested the material for its ability to resist rocket engine exhaust at its facility. “We were surprised how well it held up. We knew from lab testing that our material was stronger than concrete, but we didn’t know how it would hold up under a hot, violent rocket flame,” Centers said. This landing pad material has been tested already thank to an agreement with a US based rocket company. Stoke Space fired their rocket engines directly at a landing pad sample to see how the material could hand a rocket exhaust plume for 5 seconds. You can see the results were impressive with very little ablation. The material can self-heal from the rocket plume as the melted glass resolidifies quickly afterwards. They can build spaceports on any solid planetary body in the solar system. Except Europa, of course. Ethos Partners with Astrolab for Lunar Operations and Mobility Ethos has joined forces with Astrolab, a company recently awarded a contract by NASA, for use of its lunar rover to help to build landing pads on the Moon. Astrolab’s FLEX rover will deploy multiple power cargo boxes, each approximately 1.5 meters by 2 meters, across the lunar site where a large landing pad is to be constructed. The rover will also tow a heating trailer that melts the lunar regolith, using energy supplied by the deployed power units. This process results in a hardened, concrete-like surface. As a leader in lunar infrastructure, Ethos plans on expanding its operations to include the extraction and processing of other lunar resources such as metals, power, and water. NASA in the House NASA Technology staff visited the offices of Ethos Space Resources recently. NASA, through the Artemis program, is working on returning to the Moon in a sustainable fashion. That means living off the land by using Moon resources instead of transporting then from Earth. We don’t know what they discussed by it’s good to see NASA reaching out to these new space startups. On a post on X Ethos said: “Great to have some folks from @NASA_Technology by the Ethos shop to talk lunar landing pads and oxygen production!” Okay, on to upcoming events. Having successfully tested the processing of lunar dust simulant, and verified the resultant building materials hold up well to rocket fire the next step is to test their products on the Moon. That will require funding, either from private investors or a NASA program. Before wrapping up this video, it’s worth mentioning one of Ethos’s long-term ambitions as shared on X: “The long-term vision of Ethos is to launch 50 million metric tons of thin-film aluminium off the Moon to build a planetary sunshade.” Ideas that might be relegated to science fiction on Earth become much more feasible on the Moon. For example, launching materials directly into orbit is difficult from Earth due to the high speeds required and atmospheric resistance. On the Moon, however, the orbital speed is merely 1.7 km/s, and the absence of an atmosphere simplifies the process greatly. Various methods could be employed as outlined in related articles, including coilguns, railguns, slings, or any other mechanism capable of propelling objects at the required orbital velocity. We’ll keep you up to date with Ethos Space Resources and other lunar infrastructure companies we find. Be sure to subscribe to get the latest news on commercial space startups around the globe. From rocket launchers, to space stations, orbital tugs, lunar landers and more. If it’s a commercial space startup we cover it. See you soon!