Lunar stone cutting

> I was talking to a friend in combustion engineering last night and one
> of the topics was how do quarries cut stone. According to him, they use
> regular wire moving at about 650 feet / sec that burns through the rock.

IIRC there's an abrasive slurry added, at least for really hard stone. On
luna low vapor pressure oil could be substituted for water to take care
of cooling and lubrication. I think a rather more tricky issue is to find
large enough deposits of stone that haven't been pulverized by 4 billion
years of meteorite bombardment.

......Andrew

Andrew Case
acase@...
Institute for Plasma Research
University of Maryland, College Park |