The Moon's atmosphere is extremely thin, made up of hydrogen, neon, and argon. There is also a lot of oxygen on the Moon though … with one caveat . The Moon's atmosphere does not have enough oxygen to support human life, but its top layer of rocky soil, known as "regolith" – a layer of rock and dust from which the Moon's surface is made – does. It contains enough for 8 billion people to survive for about 100,000 years or twice as long. The only problem, of course, is that we can't breathe rocks.
And it is that oxygen can be found in many of the minerals in the soil that surrounds us. On the Moon, it makes up about 45% of the soil.
But can we do something to extract this oxygen from the regolith?
A new joint program between the Australian Space Agency and NASA has committed to sending an Australian rover to the moon through NASA's Artemis program to collect lunar rocks as an "attempt to extract oxygen from the lunar regolith." The results have the potential to change civilization as we know it, because if lunar colonists can synthesize breathable air in situ , a long-term lunar base would be much more feasible.
To access the oxygen on the surface of the Moon, it would take, yes, a lot of energy . Reactors would be required to create oxygen by electrolysis, which in itself represents a great challenge.
