Space mining the new frontier – by Mary Katherine Keown (Sudbury Star – September 13, 2013)

The Sudbury Star is the City of Greater Sudbury’s daily newspaper.

Known worldwide as a mining town, Sudbury is poised to launch into the vast universe of space mining and intergalactic resource extraction.

Deltion Innovations Ltd., a local firm, started working under its new banner earlier this month. Previously a department within NORC AT (the Northern Centre for Advanced Technology Inc.), Sherry Schmidt, Deltion’s chief administrative officer, says she and seven of her colleagues decided to go independent and for-profit when NORCAT opted out of aerospace work.

“If we’re going to have any long-term existence on the moon, whether for manufacturing or habitat, we need to be able to create items and use the resources that are actually there,” Schmidt says. “It’s very, very expensive to take anything from the Earth to the moon.”

Because fuel is so expensive, Schmidt explains it will eventually be cheaper to develop moon-based sources. Deltion’s current work focuses on the extraction of hydrogen and water from the moon for the manufacture of fuel.

“For us, the end goal is to produce hardware that can be taken to the moon and Mars,” Schmidt says. They are currently designing drilling and excavation equipment they hope will be used in the 2018 Resource Prospector mission to the moon, which is a collaboration between NASA and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA).

The mission will prospect for ice in the polar regions of the moon using a remote-controlled rover, a subsurface sampling drill and a small oven.

According to the NASA web-site, the 2018 mission will lay the foundations for using “lunar resources to produce oxygen and propellants (that) could enable new mission architectures for human exploration.”

The work is challenging — there are no templates — but endlessly inspiring. All the work they do at Deltion is origina l and Rick Mousseau, a machinist by trade and a senior mechanical technologist at the company, says he has had “numerous” late-night epiphanies.

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