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A comment on Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species [video]. Parent comment

Re:Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species [video] by simonh on Thursday September 29, 2016 @04:26AM (#12603959)
> I notice Musk's ISRU plan is to mine ice; I do wonder how he's going to do that, as it won't be easy.

Load up the icy dirt into a chamber using a digger, heat it up and precipitate out the water vapor. The only potential problem is separating out other volatiles, but fractionation is pretty basic tech.

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Re:Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species [video] by david-given on Thursday September 29, 2016 @05:46AM (#12604200)
D'oh, I totally should have thought of that.

Provided you have a decent power source that's easy: the hardest part is getting your raw material into the chamber and disposing of the debris afterwards. Humans driving flat-pack bulldozers, most likely.

Would work on the Moon, too.

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Re:Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species [video] by simonh on Thursday September 29, 2016 @07:56AM (#12604568)
You could probably heat up the regolith while it's on a conveyor belt and use a negative pressure system to draw off the vapour through cooling tubes, so it could operate continuously.
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