EcoMine™ KREEP – Bioregenerative Rare Earth Element Mining from Lunar Mare Regolith

NASA’s plans to establish a sustained Lunar presence for scientific research, Mars mission preparation, and a thriving commercial Lunar economy will require significant surface infrastructure. The use of in situ resources enables a more economical and sustainable approach to constructing this infrastructure. Lunar regolith contains an abundance of raw materials, like Rare Earth Elements (REEs), that can be used for in-situ construction on the moon, and on Earth. However, traditional Earth mining processes are not economically feasible on the moon, due to high energy demands, labor needs, high mass transport costs for consumable reagents, lower ore quality, and potential environmental and safety impacts. EcoMine™ is a bioregenerative mining facility for the Lunar surface that combines a closed-loop biomining process with an autonomous, self-powered, bioprocessing facility for commercial mining operations. EcoMine™ offers commercial Lunar mine operators an environmentally safe and more profitable way to recover REE and other valuable minerals, with less energy consumption, higher extraction efficiency, and significantly less mass transport costs than traditional chemical mining solutions. EcoMine™ is a major step towards a viable, sustainable lunar economy. In Phase I, Space Lab will demonstrate the technical feasibility of the EcoMine™ concept to autonomously, safely, and efficiently extract and separate REE minerals from non-polar Lunar mare regolith and prepare for future technology development. Project objectives are to demonstrate proof-of-concept for REE extraction, separation and recovery; and to investigate intra-facility regolith transport solutions, accomplished through conceptual design and analysis, process validation with benchtop experiments, and EDU development planning.