Earth’s celestial neighbour the moon has enough oxygen to sustain 8 billion people for 100,000 years.
That’s according to John Grant, a lecturer in soil science at Australia’s Southern Cross University.
While the moon’s atmosphere is devoid of the life-giving gas, a significant amount was likely to the present in its regolith, the body’s rocky top layer, which was easily accessible.
According to Grant, humans need about 800g of oxygen a day to survive, and the regolith is some ten metres deep and made up of 45% oxygen, which is tightly bound to minerals such as silica, aluminium, and iron and magnesium oxides.
While the process of extracting the Oxygen from the rocks is not complicated, it’s requires a lot of energy, and therefore would have to be powered by solar technology of an as yet unknown energy source on the moon.
