Team Chosen to Make First Oxygen on the Moon
PARIS (ESA PR) — Following a competition, ESA has selected the industrial team that will design and build the first experimental payload to extract oxygen from the surface of the Moon. The winning consortium, led by Thales Alenia Space in the UK, has been tasked with producing a small piece of equipment that will evaluate the prospect of building larger lunar plants to extract propellant for spacecraft and breathable air for astronauts – as well as metallic raw materials for equipment.
The compact payload will need to extract 50-100 grams of oxygen from lunar regolith – targeting 70% extraction of all available oxygen within the sample – while delivering precision measurements of performance and gas concentations. And it will have to do all this in a hurry, within a 10 day period – running on the solar power available within a single fortnight-long lunar day, before the coming of the pitch-black, freezing lunar night.
ESA’s Directorate of Human and Robotic Exploration selected the Thales-led team made up of AVS, Metalysis, Open University and Redwire Space Europe following a detailed study last year, evaluating three rival designs. The process followed a new approach to selecting system concepts.
“Employing a challenge approach let us evaluate the competing payload concepts on a precise, side-by-side basis,” comments David Binns, Systems Engineer from ESA’s state-of-the-art Concurrent Design Facility (CDF). “Now we’re looking forward to working with the winning consortium to make their design a practical reality.
“The payload needs to be compact, low power and able to fly on a range of potential lunar landers, including ESA’s own European Large Logistics Lander, EL3. Being able to extract oxygen from moonrock, along with useable metals, will be a game changer for lunar exploration, allowing the international explorers set to return to the Moon to ‘live off the land’ without being dependent on long and expensive terrestrial supply lines.”
Giorgio Magistrati, Studies and Technologies Team Leader at ESA’s ExPeRT (Exploration Preparation, Research and Technology) initiative adds: “The time is right to begin work on realising this In-Situ Resource Utilisation demonstrator, the first step in our larger ISRU implementation strategy. Once the technology is proven using this initial payload, our approach will culminate in a full-scale ISRU plant in place on the Moon in the early part of the following decade.”
The underlying concept has already been proven. Samples returned from the lunar surface confirm that lunar regolith is made up of 40–45% percent oxygen by weight, its single most abundant element. The difficulty is that this oxygen is bound up chemically as oxides in the form of minerals or glass, so is unavailable for immediate use.
However a prototype oxygen plant has been set up in ESTEC’s Materials and Electrical Components Laboratory. This plant employs an electrolysis-based process to separate simulated lunar regolith into metals and oxygen, key basic resources for long-term sustainable space missions.
22 responses to “Team Chosen to Make First Oxygen on the Moon”
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Does anyone else remember the novel, The Moon is Hell! by John W. Campbell (same fellow who wrote Who Goes There? that became the script for The Thing)? The book is largely about a small exploration team stranded on the Moon, learning to make their own air, water, food.
Heard of it, but never read it.
It would seem after so many years of NewSpace neglect, the Moon is no longer verboten.
We are going.
Obama made it verboten. Trump made it a priority. NewSpace is going to make it reachable – with or without SLS and Orion.
I give Bridenstine all the credit. The only one out of all of them that was worth his paycheck. And he recanted his climate change denial. I wish he had stayed on.
https://uploads.disquscdn.c…
Yeah…I know what Jim is thinking: “this guy is the problem.”
Or he might be thinking…”Wow! This guy just sent crew to ISS, and brought them safely back. I’m his #1 Fanboy!”
Bridenstine’s priority was exploiting lunar resources. Musk’s priority was keeping NASA spending money on SpaceX and NOT the Moon. Now, what did you say he was thinking again?
If Musk’s priority was for NASA to not spend money on the Moon, he sure must have been pissed off when SX won the HLS contract.
“Musk’s priority was keeping NASA spending money on SpaceX-“
True. But I’m thinking that this is a win-win situation. You get your return-to-the-Moon jollies, and I get my HLS Fanboy B.S. We’re almost Soul Mates here.
Have you been drinking again?
Not yet. I like to think that I’m on a natural high. My family, on the other hand, thinks I’m a wacko.
I know the “wacko’s” here pretty well but you don’t seem rotten to the core like them. At least you have a sense of humor. You should try not to fall into the right wing ideological cesspool here though.
I hope it is not too late for you.
Thank you for the kind words. I admit to being a political independent my entire adult life. Therefore, I’m very skeptical of both parties. I also admit to toying with boxing (like you) and also kickboxing back in the day. I suspect some lingering brain damage from those fun times. But I’m carrying on, doing my best to dodge cesspools, and trying not to be too rotten. It’s a work in progress.
Good for you. How’s your left hook?
Just thinking about it makes my shoulder ache. I’ve still got a pretty mean head butt. And I could do the Mike Tyson ear bite…but I’d have to ask for my dentures back after the bout.
Whereas your brain seems to have no upper limit on the amount of contradiction it can ignore.
Bridenstine’s priority was to get American astronauts back to the Moon ASAP while diminishing SLS’s role to whatever minimum wouldn’t set off Sen. Shelby.
Musk’s priority… So that’s why SpaceX never put in a proposal for HLS… oh, wait…
At the time the picture was taken, he’d more likely have been thinking, “This guy is the solution.”
He deserves a lot of it. But he had backing. I view his “recanting climate change denial” as roughly equivalent to what all those lefty judicial nominees always say about respecting the Constitution. I, too, wish he had stayed on. But I appreciate that he obviously realized he would have no backing and the job was hard enough with backing.