Sierra Space soil-extraction technology could lead to oxygen ‘gas station on the moon’

LOUISVILLE — When humans return to the moon (and ultimately travel beyond), they’ll need plenty of oxygen, both to breathe and propel crafts through space. Luckily for astronauts, there’s plenty packed inside lunar soil and Louisville-based Sierra Space Corp. says it has achieved a major breakthrough in development of technology for extracting that crucial resource.

The company’s Carbothermal Oxygen Production Reactor, or COPR technology, recently crossed a key testing milestone at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, marking, SSC said, “the first time in history that oxygen has been extracted from simulated lunar soil, or regolith, using an automated, standalone system in a lunar environment.”

The achievement, Sierra Space program manager Brant White told BizWest, represents “the culmination of about 30 years of work,” much of it done by scientists and companies absorbed into SSC’s operations over the last few years. 

“All of the recent work we’ve done is built off of that early development work we did decades ago,” he said. “As of late, it’s been all about maturing the technology, showing that this technology has a path to full-scale production and using it to (prove that SSC can) actually produce oxygen in quantity on the moon to refuel space craft landing there or sustain lunar habitats or orbital habitats.”

Sierra Space Corp., which spun off from Sierra Nevada Corp. and planted its flag in Louisville in 2021 and claimed a valuation in excess of $5 billion last year, has built up facilities in Virginia just outside of Washington, D.C., in Durham in the heart of North Carolina’s Research Triangle and in Madison, Wisconsin, where much of the COPR research and development has occurred. 

Beyond COPR, SSC is developing a number of complementary technologies such as the Dream Chaser space plane and the Large Integrated Flexible Environment (LIFE) Habitat, a modular, three-story commercial habitation, business and science platform.

“By harnessing the natural resources found on the moon, we reduce our reliance on Earth-based supplies and open up new frontiers for space exploration and commercialization,” SSC CEO Tom Vice said in a prepared statement. “With our breakthrough technology that can provide a reliable source of oxygen in-situ, 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.”

The good news for future space explorers is regolith isn’t hard to find. The moon’s surface “is literally covered in it,” White said. 

“A good way to think of it is a couple coffee cups of soil can support the breathing needs of a crew member for a day,” he said, but the “vast, vast majority of the oxygen goes to rocket engines, not the breathing needs.”

White estimated that a year-long mission would need to excavate about one-third of a football field’s worth of lunar soil to supply enough oxygen for propulsion and breathing needs.

Because a large chunk of the weight carried by any craft launched into space is devoted to oxygen storage for propulsion, “there’s such a huge economic benefit to the U.S. and the U.S. taxpayers to be able to make the oxygen while you’re up there” on the moon rather than lugging it along for the ride.

Future space-based users of COPR technology would “have a rover that scoops up (lunar soil) and brings it over to a hopper. …Then we do our processing where we heat it up and strip off the oxygen.”

Once the oxygen is removed, what’s left over is a “rich ore material,” White said. “Right now, once it solidifies we just remove it from our system. But there are downstream processes that NASA is starting to work on developing where you can actually extract (minerals such as) aluminum and iron and other building materials and metals. You could do manufacturing and make whatever widget you need to on the surface of the moon, all coming ultimately from just that lunar dirt.”

The full utility of lunar soil is still unknown. “This is why it’s so important to actually go to the moon,” White said. “There’s still a lot of speculation” about the makeup of materials on the moon. 

NASA’s “Apollo program took us to the moon to study and learn. (The space agency’s) Artemis (program) is taking us back to the moon, this time to stay,”  Vice said in a statement. “Our company is focused on building the infrastructure necessary to enable continuous human presence on the lunar surface. This sustainable future begins with developing the core technology and systems that create oxygen in that environment, using local natural resources.”

While the COPR project has developed in large part thanks to NASA support, the technology is not meant exclusively for government customers.

“It’s for everybody. You can really think of it like we’re putting a gas station on the moon,” White said. “We’re making oxygen for everybody to use, whether that’s U.S. government entities or international or commercial.”

And while the moon is likely to be the first stop in COPR’s journey into space, the ultimate destination for the technology it helps birth in the future could be much farther away.

“I really believe that we will have a presence on the moon by the time I retire,” White said. The moon will likely serve as a proving ground for technology that could ultimately be used for humanity’s next major step in space exploration: a manned mission to Mars, which “is a much tougher place to get to.”