Summer Space Festival 2022: Lunar exploration in focus

From Friday 24 June to Saturday 25 June, Space Applications Services gave insight into the work that we do in lunar exploration. The Summer Space Festival was a chance for us to showcase our lunar rover LUVMI-X, and to illustrate our company culture and our vision as we take our place in the “New Space” economy.

Diego Urbina, Team Lead for Future Projects and Exploration gave an overview of technology needs and system for In-Situ Resource Utilisation (ISRU). By developing technologies and systems in space resources utilisation (SRU), Space Applications Services is positioning itself for future potential markets. The SRU value chain holds multiple affordances for life support for humans; construction of in-situ infrastructure; manufacturing of equipment in Space, the provision of electrical power and night survival as a service, and much more. As such, the company has already successfully completed and is working on numerous projects in this domain.

• ESA ALCHEMIST, ALCHEMIST-Earth Based Demonstrator, and ISRULAB which seek to produce water and oxygen from lunar regolith.

• REGOLIGHT which aims to construct infrastructure on the Moon using lunar regolith.

• Lunar resources prospecting systems

• ESA ECSM and Skybeam, which aim to deliver solar electric power as a resource for use on the Moon and on Earth.
• PRO-ACT (Planetary Robots Deployed for Assembly & Construction Tasks) enables and demonstrates multi-robot collaborative planning and manipulation capabilities in the context of construction of an ISRU plant.