Asri-unix.1133 net.space utcsrgv!utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!ARPAVAX:C70:sri-unix!REM@MIT-MC Fri Apr 2 00:54:09 1982 Another source of hydrogen? Recall that most materials we'll need for space industry and life-support are already known to exist on the moon, but hydrogen may be hard to find locally. We've suggested the polar regions of the Moon which might have water-ice, the outer surface of the Moon which may have atoms of hydrogen from the solar wind accumulated over 4 billion years, and more distant sources such as asteroids comets and Jupiter. Here's a new idea I came up with tonight: Once we get an SPS working, suppose we build two large electrodes and charge one positive and the other negative. Then free electrons will be attracted to the positive one and free protons to the negative one. The electrons merely flow through our circuit where they combine with the protons to form hydrogen which we then collect somehow. Thus instead of collecting atomic hydrogen, we collect hydrogen which has been ionized by the solar ultraviolet radiation (plus some stray protons). Anybody want to speculate on whether this idea could be made to work cost-effectively? One idea for collecting the hydrogen after the protons have been grabbed: If the protons embed themselves in the surface of the negative electrode, we may simply run the device for a while to collect a considerable quantity of embedded hydrogen, then turn the device off, cover the electrode with something (to make a sealed chamber with the electrode as one wall), zap the electrode with a laser to boil off the hydrogen, collect the hydrogen from the chamber in any of the ways suggested earlier for boiling hydrogen off the surface of the moon, then remove the cover and turn the electric charge back on to collect another batch. Anybody have other ideas? ----------------------------------------------------------------- gopher://quux.org/ conversion by John Goerzen of http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/ This Usenet Oldnews Archive article may be copied and distributed freely, provided: 1. There is no money collected for the text(s) of the articles. 2. The following notice remains appended to each copy: The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright (C) 1981, 1996 Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.