Description: 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.

Benefits: NASA envisions an increasing human presence on the surface of the moon, for scientific research, Mars mission preparation, and other commercial activities. This growing Lunar economy will require significant surface infrastructure for transportation, habitation, power, and communication. Lunar regolith provides a local source of minerals needed for building materials, like Silicon, Aluminum, Titanium, and Rare Earth Elements (REEs) from non-polar mare regolith. Regolith mining could reduce the cost and the environmental impact of excavating and transporting those materials from Earth. But the mining processes that are typically used on Earth would be quite expensive to implement on the moon due to high costs for labor, energy, transport of ore to be processed, and transport of consumable chemical reagents from Earth. A regolith mine that can operate safely, autonomously, and reliably in the Lunar environment, that has a high extraction efficiency from low grade ore, and that regenerates consumable reagents would be more profitable, gaining a competitive advantage in the Lunar infrastructure industry. EcoMine has the potential for infusion into the Moon to Mas Program under the Exploration Systems Mission Directorate (ESMD) .EcoMine offers commercial Lunar mine operators an environmentally safe and more profitable way to recover minerals from regolith needed for Lunar surface construction, as well as minerals of value on Earth. Also, bioleaching is becoming more attractive for the extraction of REEs from spent ore and electronic waste on Earth. The Earth REE market was $2.6 billion in 2020, expected to grow to $5.5 billion in 2028 driven by rising demand for consumer electronics like laptops and smartphones and for electric vehicles. While profit margins are small for REE bioleaching, glucose is the most expensive resource in the REE bioleaching process. Thus EcoMine may provide significant cost (and carbon footprint) savings by producing microbial biominers' organic carbon source directly at the point of consumption. A third market to explore is the microbial production of citric acid on Earth, a $3.5B industry. The bioregenerative EcoMine could be adapted into a circular citric acid production facility with potentially reduced cost and carbon footprint over traditional fermentation facilities.