Speaker 0:  the moon is no longer just a destination. it's a gas station and a hardware store. blue origin's air pioneer reactor just proved we can literally cook moon dust into breathable air and rocket fuel, flashing the cost of space travel by 60%. so moon dust becomes our lunar life support system. blue origin has successfully demonstrated that the air pioneer reactor, which extracts metal grade oxygen from simulated lunar soil, this is isn't a lab experiment. it's a production ready prototype that passed nasa's critical design review. this effectively ends our total dependence on earth for survivability in space, making permanent lunar bases economically viable for the first time. what do you think about this, john?

Speaker 1:  yeah. i think this is cool. it did i miss something that there's tons of oxygen on the moon? because this is really the first time i've been hearing about this, and, apparently, everyone knows this. so, so the cool thing about lunar soil or regolith, it's composed largely of metal oxides. so silicon dioxide, aluminum oxide, iron oxide. and so these compounds, they contain 40 to 45% of oxygen by weight. so that makes oxygen the most abundant element on the moon, but it's chemically bound and unusable in its natural state. so the challenge has always been how to extract oxygen efficiently without bringing massive industrial infrastructure from earth. and so there's this cool process. it's the most promising method as molten regolith electrolysis. so what happens is moon dust is heated to extremely high temperature. let's we're talking 800 to a thousand degrees celsius. i don't know what it is in fahrenheit or higher. and it's melted into a liquid state, then an electric current is passed through it, and then oxygen is released as a gas. now, you get some byproducts of that. you get metals as a byproduct, iron, aluminum, etcetera. but this process essentially splits the chemical bonds and holds oxygen inside lunar minerals. and so the key advantage, it requires only regular and energy, so no additional chemicals. and it produces oxygen and useful construction metals, which is pretty cool. so you get breathable oxygen, and you get metals that you can use to build the infrastructure. now there are some hurdles that are going to remain in this. so, like, let's reality check this for a second. extreme temperatures are required. so there's a high energy demand in a harsh lunar environment. you're handling corrosive molten materials and trying to efficiently capture and storing oxygen gas within all of this. so even a large scale tests, systems themselves, the test they must operate in vacuum conditions and materials degrade quickly under thermal stress. so, there's still a lot to think about, but what i like this. this is kinda cool. this makes it promising for us to establish, bases and makes it much more easy for us to establish bases, don't you think, on the moon?

Speaker 0:  oh, absolutely. and to, comment on your first thing about oxygen on the moon, we knew there was oxygen on the moon when we found ice. so the yeah. but we didn't really know about this that we could pull it out. so i just wanted to and the ice wasn't as abundant enough for this and all that kind of stuff. so this changes this. think of this update like a magical oven that takes a bag of dry, dusty flour and turns it both into oxygen you can breathe and the electricity that runs your house. you aren't even bringing the bread from home anymore. you're just harvesting the dirt in the backyard to build the whole bakery. so full autonomous earth based demo happening in 2026 with, lunar deployments targeted, for late twenty twenties. not sure what we're targeting 2028, 2029. fully integrated with nasa's artemis program and future commercial colonies. it operates at one megawatt up enough to power a thousand earth homes. outputs 99.999 pure silicon and medical, grade oxygen. the oxygen makes up 45% of the lunar regolith by weight, so this process unlocks it all. so this is really, really cool, and it explains why things like elon musk are moving towards launching rockets from the moon versus earth and building a base there to refuel and do stuff as oxygen and whatnot becomes more available in these types of tools because it becomes easier to do that from the moon, and takes less resources from us and be able to mine the resources there. so the byproduct is so pure that it is semiconductor grade, allowing for the three d printing of solar panels directly on the moon without using a single toxic chemical. the project was developed at blue origin space resource center of excellence in la. it's a massive 60,000 square foot facility dedicated entirely to living off the land in space. the oxygen purity purity was verified using the exact same flight, metrology hardware nasa uses at the kennedy space center, meaning this stimulated air is already clean for astronaut clean enough for and cleared for astronauts' lungs. the power requirement is pretty big. running a one megawatt reactor on the moon requires a nuclear fission surface, system or a football field solar sized, array, neither of which are fully developed yet. so we'll have to figure out if we can power this thing. any final thoughts on this, john?

Speaker 1:  no. is, this is super interesting. i'm curious to see how we solve the energy problem. but yeah.

Speaker 0:  we're moving from camping on the moon to living on the moon, thanks to a reactor that turns gray dirt into gold. if you were offered a one way ticket to a lunar base powered by moon dust, would you take it, or is earth's atmosphere still the only air you trust? let us know in the chat.