Metalysis awarded ESA contract for lunar resource harvesting

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The European Space Agency has awarded a contract to Metalysis, which is developing a method to harvest oxygen and metals from the Moon’s surface.  

Sheffield’s Metalysis will be funded for nine months to further evolve an electrochemical process that separates oxygen and metals from lunar soil. In a recent study conducted by the firm with Glasgow University, the technology was able to extract 96 per cent of the oxygen from JSC-2A, a simulant material similar in composition to the regolith found on the Moon.

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The process, which involves passing an electrical current through the material, has been used on Earth at an industrial scale in the production of titanium and tantalum since 2018, but with oxygen as a by-product. On the Moon, that oxygen would be of huge value for both human life support and as a key component in the production of rocket fuel for exploration beyond Earth’s solitary satellite, while the metal powders could be used in the construction of permanent lunar bases.

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