A European startup is perfecting technology that will be sent to the moon to make oxygen from lunar soil as part of a 2025 European Space Agency (ESA) demonstration mission.
Belgium-based Space Applications Services is building three experimental reactors under
a contract with ESA announced on Wednesday (May 12). The reactors will be used to fine-tune the oxygen-making process to be tested on the moon as part of the planned
in situ resource utilization demonstration (ISRU) mission in 2025.
The oxygen-making machine will rely on the FFC Cambridge process, originally developed in the late 1990s for direct extraction of titanium from titanium oxide, which can be found in nature in the minerals rutile and anatase. The process — named after its inventors George Chen, Derek Fray and Thomas Farthing, and Cambridge University in England where they all worked —uses electrolysis to separate the pure metal from the ore.
www.space.com
