Akihabara News (Tokyo) — Japanese startup ispace and the Helios Project of Israel have signed an agreement to cooperate on experiments that could one day allow oxygen to be produced on the Moon, thus allowing humans to work and live independently of the Earth.
Helios Project is developing a reactor for the purpose of processing lunar soil to extract oxygen, as well as metals such as iron, aluminum, and silicon, in order to allow future Moon colonists to “live off the land.” It hopes that its process might make it possible to extract 250 kilograms of oxygen from each ton of lunar soil.
Jonathan Geifman, Helios’s cofounder and CEO, explained in a statement, “In order not to have to endlessly transport equipment to the lunar station and causing life outside of Earth to operate under restrictive constraints, we need to look at things through the prism of infrastructure that can produce materials from natural resources. The technology we are developing is part of the value chain that enables the establishment of permanent bases away from Earth.”
For its part, ispace tweeted that it “intends to provide payload delivery service to Helios 2x in coming years for Helios to conduct demo to extract oxygen.”
Ispace CEO Takeshi Hakamada also stated at the signing ceremony, held at the Japanese Embassy in Tel Aviv, “We are very excited by their technology and we believe this effort will stimulate more players to enter this market. We hope there will be many more opportunities to collaborate on the shared interest in lunar exploration together.”
This agreement marks the first collaboration by private companies within the space industry between Japan and Israel.
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