Technology Roadmap:
Plasma-based Oxygen Generation in Space
In MIT’s Technology Roadmapping course, this roadmap was developed using a method called ATRA (Advanced Technology Roadmap Architecture), which can enable planning and developing new and improved technologies.
Oxygen generation in space is a critical enabling technology to support the development of human exploration of the Moon and Mars. NASA's Artemis program plans to head back to the Moon this decade in a phased approach to build up lunar activity, including a commercial and International presence, to serve as a proving ground for human missions to Mars. Increasingly longer stays off-world at destinations of increasing distance from Earth require technologies that recycle and utilize available resources, called in-situ resource utilization (ISRU), to make large mission architectures feasible and enable dramatic cost-savings. Notably, the most near-term large-scale oxygen demand will be driven by lunar lander propellant needs, like Starship and Blue Moon (both contracted by NASA as part of the Human Landing System). One projection estimates that the market valuation of the ISRU sector will reach 63$ billion by 2040, where 99% of the demand is driven by propellant [1]. There are three primary resources available in space to extract oxygen: water, CO2, and regolith (unconsolidated material on a planetary surface; soil). Water and oxygen found in regolith are both available on the Moon and Mars, whereas CO2 is only found in the Mars environment.
The subject of this technology roadmap is plasma-based oxygen generation. Non-thermal plasma reactors are emerging power-to-gas technologies with the potential to facilitate various chemical synthesis processes. In plasma-based systems, electrical power is used to ionize a feedstock gas, creating a highly reactive environment that leverages electron excitation chemistry to break stable molecular bonds and produce value-added products. Plasma reactors operate at non-equilibrium conditions which allows lower-temperature operation and instantaneous start-up, making them adaptable to intermittent power availability. Unlike other technologies, plasma reactors can process any feedstock, and have electrical settings and environmental conditions which can be tuned to optimize or favor particular products. Plasma reactors can reduce regolith and produce water (a source of oxygen) and transform CO2 into oxygen. This means that plasma-based conversion technologies are extensible to both near and far-term missions, and can be used where any of these resources are found on the Moon and Mars.
The full technology roadmap can be found online here.
