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Glittering-Jello-935 t1_je8cq6w wrote

Reply to comment by vikinglander in We Need to Get Back to the Moon by Guy_PCS

Assuming you can create fuel on the moon, where do you store it?

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vikinglander t1_je8rwsd wrote

Store it as water apparently. Produce the H2 and O2 needed is the usual story.

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Glittering-Jello-935 t1_je9v0si wrote

You have to create fuel out of it, so you will have to store H2 and O2 at some point. That will take massive tanks if you are going to store for more than a few hours, it'll bleed out of smaller tanks. And it will take a long time and significant infrastructure to create that fuel, you don't have a lot of power generation any solar panels (which apparently you will need vast fields of) will have to be launched from Earth, installed and maintained. Temperatures on the moon reach 250F/120C, so you'll need vast amounts of insulation.

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mylittlethrowaway135 t1_jeb3u4z wrote

process it then store it back (as ice) in the permanent shadow until it needs to be processed?

seems like the most efficient way.

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vikinglander t1_jed92m8 wrote

Yeah so the idea of using lunar resources for propellant is nonsense.

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Glittering-Jello-935 t1_jeepq90 wrote

I don't know, if you have time and robots, you could dig large holes and if you can make some kind of concrete out of regolith that might do the trick. It'll take years of constant effort that no human could do and involves tech we haven't invented yet, but tech we hadn't invented yet in 1960 actually got us to the moon.

My point is it will take a long, long time if it can be done at all and it cannot be done by humans working on the moon

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