Advanced alloys and metal/ceramic composites from lunar source materials

The problems of balancing the costs of transporting materials from the Earth against the costs of transporting, commissioning and running extraction plant on the Moon mean that utilisation of lunar resources can most usefully be discussed with reference to a development programme. This paper concentrates on likely materials usage in the first two decades or so of lunar industrialisation when all machinery will be Earth-supplied and where lunar materials will be used only for fairly large scale use with minimal post-extraction processing and fabrication. This paper covers a period where a roughly linear growth law operates before the exponential growth of a self-sustaining lunar economy begins to take off[1]. © 1982.