Most lunar products will be rods, beams, pipes and tubes made by extrusion. Also flanges, pressure vessels and tanks, nuts and bolts, and metal plates both flat and curved. Rods will be cut into short pieces, heads stamped on them and filed, and threaded to make bolts. Rods will also be used for axels and drive shafts for motors and generators. Flanges will be needed to join pipes to water tanks, liquid gas tanks and rocket propellant tanks. They could be forged with power hammers. Beams, pipes and tubes might be made of basalt as well as iron, steel and aluminum. Metal plates will be made by casting slabs and rolling them thinner in rolling mills. Flat plates will be used for vehicle cabins, habitat modules, rolling mill frames, mining shovel buckets and more. Curved plates will be rolled to make cement mixers, ball mills, cylindrical tanks, etc. How do we make domes for the ends of some tanks?? Flat plates will be cut with lasers to make various parts like webs for reinforcing rectangular habitat.
Besides bolting things togther, the major joining process will be electric arc welding with welding rods made of steel on the Moon. Aluminum will require TIG welding with upported tungsten rods. Some welding will be done with oxy-acetylene. Arc and TIG welding can be done outside but oxy-acetylene will be done inside pressurized chambers to recover CO2 and H2O from the air.
Casting will also be done. There will also be some forging of large parts. See: http://www.moonminer.com/Lunar-Manufacturing-2.html
I think i can see some process or progress order here…
1) Land 100s of tons of equipment, mine regolith, extract materials, chiefly iron and silicon, and volatiles (H,He,C,N), also cannibalize landers for materials like aluminum, and do some Al extraction on the Moon to, and make some cement
somewhere along the line purify silicon, dope it and make more solar panels
2) make steel of various grades
3) form steel rods, beams, pipes, tubes, flanges, nuts, bolts, pressure vessels, tanks, plates of various thicknesses (most flat, some curved), maybe some sheets (hot roll plates several times to thin them out, cut ‘em as they widen into narrower plates, and finally cold roll sheets if we want work hardened sheet metal)
4) bolt together a frame from beams then weld up flat plates and weld in webs and make mobile homes for living in and working in. Some inflated modules will be landed on the Moon for living and working in earlier, before we get the mobile homes set up
5) expand steel production by building magma electrolysis furnaces powered by solar panel DC to get iron, and keep mining for iron fines that have 5% nickel in them until the mining ‘bots are run into the ground
6) make electric motors and generators for induction furnaces for carburizing and melting with flux to get more steel. Workers and robots in mobile homes will assemble motors and some generators..will need lots of motors for various purposes
7) forge, cast and extrude frames and axels for more mining robots. make buckets of welded steel plates.
9) aluminum production will also require heat supplied by induction
10) keep mining and sell helium 3 for about $1.6 million per kilogram
SiO2 reacted with carbon and chlorine gives silicon tetrachloride that boils at about 57 C. This gas is deposited on hot metal fingers or hot metal plates at about 850 C and decomposes to a silicon film and chlorine is released and recycled. But how do we get the dopants in there?? Boron trichloride boils at only 12.5 C so it too is gaseous…and aluminum trichloride boils at 190 C. so we can gassify it too….so we need aluminum on the Moon for p-type dopant or we have to ship boron up there…and phosphorus for n-type dopant because there isn’t much phosphorus bearing KREEP near Mt. Malapert. Boron oxide reacted with C and Cl gives BCl3. Silicon melts at 1400 C.
We will ship chlorine to the Moon in the form of copper, zinc and lithium salts instead of big tanks of supercold liquid chlorine. Eventually we will get some Cl, Cu and Zn from volcanic glass mining.
To get first things first, before we do any manufacturing on the Moon we have to do some mining on the Moon. Before we do any mining on the Moon we have to explore the Moon more to find the best mine sites. We also need to develop mining and manufacturing devices on Earth and test them in large vacuum chambers that also simulate lunar temperature extremes. Then we need to test everything on the Moon. The first manned Moon base will probably be on Mt. Malapert near the south pole. There isn’t as much iron, titanium or basalt here as there is in the mare but the Sun shines 340 out of 365 days a year at Mt. Malapert and there is ice nearby in shadowed craters. There is also plenty of Si, Al, Mg and Ca.
At Mt. Malapert we could set up a base made of inflated regolith covered modules. We would also set up mining tractors that can descend into shadowed craters and mine ice. Then we would convert that ice to LH2 and LOX or silane+LOX to power reusable rockets that make sub-orbital hops to locations all over the Moon that deploy wheeled prospecting robots that thouroghly explore areas of interest. While lunar orbiters can detect areas where there might be ice or elements of value, we really need the ground truth from soil samples, drilled cores, etc. When the robots are done exploring they will rocket back to the base at Mt. Malapert and detailed analysis of samples will be done.
The robots could be teleoperated from Earth and from the Moon base via comsats and L1 and L2 or in elliptical polar orbits.
To really get down to square one, before we start mining and mass production of thousands of helium 3 mining robots on the Moon, we have to have helium 3 fusion and we don’t. Massive amounts of money have been put into fission research and not enough into fusion research. We’re still trying to get deuterium-tritium fusion. As for SPSs, we have no experience building anything in space larger than the ISS, so it stands to reason we will need more experience with constructing large stations in space before we rush headlong into SPS building attempts. We can make a case for space tourism because of this. Not only would space tourism be a way of getting money out of the wealthy instead of pulling their teeth (I am superstitious) it would give us a chance to build large space stations like those envisoned by Space Islands Group and gain valuable experience in space construction.
I don’t want to be a dentist or a doctor (he who cureth can maketh ill). I’d rather be a space hotel keeper. So if the pirates want their treasure, let ‘em have it. Just don’t expect me to heal them with anything besides prayer or some herbs. But I’d still rather be a space tourism buisness man than a herbalist or a minister, and I don’t ever want to be a chaste catholic priest.