The European Space Agency (ESA) announced the winning industrial team that will design and build an experimental payload to extract oxygen from the regolith (lunar soil) on the surface of the Moon. The team is led by UK-based Thales ALENA Space and is tasked with producing a small solar-powered prototype device that will be used to evaluate the prospect of building oxygen-generation plants on the moon.

This could be useful for generating oxygen that can be used as a propellant and for astronauts to breathe.

The compact payload designed by the team will have to extract between 50 and 100 grams of oxygen from the lunar regolith while targeting the extraction of 70 per cent of all available oxygen within the sample. The device will also have to do all this within a period of ten days, which is how long solar power will be available within a single lunar day before the pitch-black and freezing lunar night.

The payload is also required to be low power and able to fly on different lunar landers, including ESA’s own European Large Logistics Lander, EL3.

The winning team that also consists of AVS, Metalysis  Open University and Red wire Space Europe was selected by the ESA’s Directorate of Human and Robotic Exploration in 2021 after conducting a detailed study including three rival designs.

According to David Bins, Systems Engineer at ESA’s Concurrent Design Facility (CDF), the ability to extract oxygen and other useable materials from lunar regolith will be a game-changer for lunar exploration, allowing astronauts to ‘live off the land’ without depending on long and expensive supply lines from the earth.

It had already previously been discovered that lunar regolith from the moon’s surface consists of 40-45% oxygen by weight. The problem is that this oxygen is bound up with other chemicals as oxides in the form of minerals or glass, making it unavailable for use without processing.

In 2020, the ESA had set up a prototype oxygen plant in the Materials and Electrical Components Laboratory of the European Space Research and Technology Center, ESTAC, based in the Netherlands. The lab is used to extract oxygen from simulated regolith to fine-tune the process for efficiency.

 California startup Astrolabe unveils space rover, more than a mere ‘moon buggy’

A Los Angeles-area startup founded by a veteran spaceflight robotics engineer unveiled on Thursday its full-scale, working prototype for a next-generation lunar rover that is just as fast as NASA’s old “moon buggy” but is designed to do much more.

The company, Venturi Astrolabe Inc, released photos and video showing its Flexible Logistics and Exploration (FLEX) vehicle riding over the rugged California desert near Death Valley National Park during a five-day field test in December.

Astrolabe executives say the four-wheeled, car-sized FLEX rover is designed for use in NASA’s Artemis program, aimed at returning humans to the moon as early as 2025 and establishing a long-term lunar colony as a precursor to sending astronauts to Mars.

Unlike the 1970s Apollo-era moon buggies or the current generation of robotic Mars rovers tailored for specialized tasks and experiments, FLEX is designed as an all-purpose vehicle that can be driven by astronauts or by remote control.

Built around a modular payload system inspired by conventional containerized shipping, FLEX is versatile enough to be used for exploration, cargo delivery, site construction and other logistical work on the moon, the company says.

“For humanity to truly live and operate in a sustained way off Earth, there needs to exist an efficient and economical network all the way from the launch pad to the ultimate outpost,” Astrolabe founder and CEO Jaret Matthews said in a statement announcing the rover’s development.

Other aerospace companies have announced new lunar rover design concepts, “but so far, I believe, we’re the only ones who have produced a working prototype of this scale and capability,” Matthews told Reuters in an interview on Wednesday.

If NASA adopts FLEX and its modular payload platform for Artemis, it would become the first passenger-capable rover to ply the lunar surface since Apollo 17, the last of six original U.S. manned missions to the moon, in December 1972.

Apollo 17’s lunar roving vehicle set a moon speed record of 11 miles per hour (17.7 km/h). FLEX can move just as swiftly.

Apollo astronauts found “they spent just as much time off the ground as on it at that speed, so it’s kind of a practical limit for the moon,” where gravity is one-sixth that of Earth, said Matthews, a former rover engineer for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

While Apollo L RVs carried up to two astronauts seated at its controls like a car, FLEX passengers – one or two at a time – ride standing in the back, driving the vehicle with a joystick.