Sierra Space, a leading commercial aerospace company and defense technologist building a platform in space to benefit life on Earth®, today announced that the company’s patented Carbothermal Oxygen Production Reactor has successfully completed thermal vacuum testing at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, marking the first time ever that oxygen has been extracted from simulated lunar soil, or regolith, using an automated, self-contained system in a lunar environment. When scaled up, the technology is designed to produce bulk oxygen in support of one of the primary objectives of NASA’s Artemis program: establishing the first long-term presence on the Moon.
“The Apollo program took us to the moon to study and learn. Artemis takes us back to the moon, this time to stay,” said Tom Vice, CEO of Sierra Space. “Our company is focused on building the infrastructure needed to enable continued human presence on the lunar surface. This sustainable future starts with developing the core technology and systems that create oxygen in that environment, using local natural resources.”
Sierra Space test engineers spent two weeks in August operating the company’s oxygen extraction system in a thermal vacuum chamber at Johnson, working with lunar regolith simulant in an environment the hardware would recognize as similar to the moon’s water-ice-laden south polar region. Under lunar temperatures and pressures, the Sierra Space system performed all regolith processing steps and carried out the carbothermal reduction reaction that extracts oxygen from minerals in the regolith simulant.
This breakthrough innovation, a system developed at Sierra Space's facilities in Madison, Wisconsin, represents a major step forward in enabling long-term human habitation on the Moon and future space exploration projects. The company's Destinations and In-Space Infrastructure team, known for their work inbuilding the world's first commercial LEO space stationuses the company's breakthrough technologies in large, expandable space modules, environmental control systems, and space food growth systems to build core infrastructure on the Moon.
“This latest test validates that the technologies and techniques developed and used in the Sierra Space Oxygen Extraction System would work on the lunar surface,” said Shawn Buckley, Vice President of Space Destinations Systems at Sierra Space. “These efforts confirmed that the hardware has advanced to Technology Readiness Level Six, or TRL-6, meaning it has the maturity to be incorporated into a flight mission to the Moon as a technology demonstrator.”
Temperatures in which the Sierra Space Carbothermal Oxygen Production Reactor was tested ranged from minus 45 degrees Celsius to 1,800 degrees Celsius. In addition to the challenges of operating in subzero temperatures to temperatures hotter than lava, the hardware was required to move simulated lunar regolith – a highly abrasive and jagged material because it lacks the weathering processes that occur on Earth – through the system. Potentially harmful particles were effectively handled by the hardware and gases were successfully sealed off within the reactor, thanks to Sierra Space’s use of a patented valve design that has previously demonstrated functionality for over 10,000 cycles.
The tests demonstrated that Sierra Space’s system can successfully process regolith delivered by a lunar rover or robotic arm and automatically introduce it into the reaction chamber. The carbothermal reduction reaction process is then performed to remove oxygen from the minerals in the regolith, and the processed regolith is removed from the system so that the operation can be repeated.
“By harnessing the lunar resources, we reduce our dependence on Earth-based supplies and open new frontiers for space exploration and commercialization,” Vice added. “With our breakthrough technology that can provide a reliable source of oxygen on the ground, Sierra Space is poised to play a potential role in NASA’s Artemis program and other initiatives aimed at establishing a permanent human presence on the lunar surface.”
Resources like oxygen are crucial building blocks. In addition to using oxygen for breathing, it can also be used as fuel. This is a real breakthrough for enabling economical space exploration for a long-term presence on the moon and reducing the costs of future missions to Mars.
About Sierra Spacew
Sierra Space is a leading commercial space company at the forefront of innovation and commercialization of space in the Orbital Age®, building an end-to-end business and technology platform in space to benefit life on Earth. With over 30 years and 500 missions of space heritage, the company is reinventing both space transportation with Dream Hunter®, the world’s only commercial spacecraft, and the future of space destinations with the company’s inflatable and expandable space station technology. Using commercial business models, the company also provides orbital services to commercial, DoD, and national security organizations, and is expanding manufacturing capacity to meet the needs of constellation programs. Additionally, Sierra Space builds a broad range of systems and subsystems in the areas of solar energy, mechanical and motion control, environmental control, life support, propulsion, and thermal control, and offers numerous space-as-a-service solutions for the new space economy.
Source: Sierra Space
