Lunar Propellant Production Plant Update: Journeying Towards the Moon and Beyond!
Getting to the moon and Mars is tough stuff. Even tougher, is creating scalable, efficient and affordable solutions that fuel the emerging hydrogen economies here on Earth. SKYRE is doing both at the same time - piggy-backing on well-funded government projects such as this one, to continue to advance our technology. Exciting and meaningful developments are happening with SKYRE’s Lunar Propellant Production Plant (LP3) project. As we take giant leaps towards supporting NASA's Artemis program, we simultaneously take giant leaps in the continued advancement of our H2RENEW™ product. In our latest LP3 milestone, we successfully installed unique hardware into the prototype system, moving it out of the lab and into the next phase of product testing.
The solution integrates SKYRE’s water electrolysis and electrochemical hydrogen compressor with a cryogenic liquefaction plant developed by Eta Space, to produce propellant-grade oxygen and hydrogen to permit vehicle launches from the lunar surface. Says Steven Stratford, Chemical Engineer, “Essentially what we are doing is taking water, electrolyzing it to split the oxygen from the hydrogen with our H2R (hydrogen recycling) system. We then use our EHC (electrochemical hydrogen compression) technology to compress the hydrogen for storage in cryogenic tanks
for use as a fuel.”
Specifically, the propellant generation and compression system are fully assembled and currently undergoing rigorous checkouts – poised for the next round of testing. Notably, LP3 is set to play a crucial role in the Tipping Point Program, as it will enable lunar refueling utilizing in-situ resources. Sustainability is partially enabled by using local resources as much as possible. Current plans for In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) on the Moon focuses on ice presumed to be in the permanently-shadowed craters of the Polar regions. It is an integral part of the Artemis mission and the larger vision for a mission to Mars. Importantly, without LP3, our astronauts can't make it to Mars in the first place and certainly can’t make it back home!
SKYRE attributes approximately $32 million in revenue from commercial and government customers (like NASA), to technology advancements made for the H2RENEW. The LP3 hardware is essentially an H2RENEW built to perform under more rigorous conditions while demanding more efficiency and reliability. Thus, this work directly and profoundly contributes to the ongoing development of our H2RENEW product we deliver to commercial customers. Specifically, sustainability and efficiency are imperatives for LP3, thus every project milestone is getting us closer to a fully scalable and highly efficient solution – helping put SKYRE’s H2RENEW as a proven, world-class product solution for emerging hydrogen economies right here on Earth.
