Solar oven distillation Vacuum distillation is simply boiling off materials using containerless processing in the zero gravity of orbit, or in a refractory container. A batch of material can be suspended in a giant solar oven and heated slowly, eventually reaching extremely high temperatures.
Different materials liquify or boil off at different temperatures.
After one element finishes boiling off, the temperature can be raised and the next element will be collected. The input material can be either raw minerals or the output from a previous industrial processing step. The difference between smelting and distillation is that smelting liberates the desired material in liquid or solid form, whereas distillation liberates it in gaseous form. Larry Taylor of the Univ. Their aim was to gather data on separating the metal oxides as a first step towards separating the metals.