Ice to Fuel: NASA Tests Technology for Refueling Landers 

The farther the destination, the more fuel a rocket needs. The more fuel the rocket carries, the heavier the spacecraft. The heavier the spacecraft, the more fuel it requires to launch. Experts at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland are testing technology that could solve this problem. 

The CryoFILL (Cryogenic Fluid In-Situ Liquefaction for Landers) project could transform the way NASA fuels future space exploration missions, reducing costs and extending the duration of planetary surface operations.  

“If you think about how much fuel your spacecraft would need to go to Mars and come home, it’s quite a lot,” said Evan Racine, CryoFILL project manager at NASA Glenn. “If we can produce and liquefy oxygen on the Moon or Mars, we can fuel landers on the surface where they land, reducing the amount of propellant needed to launch from Earth.” 

Through the Artemis program, NASA will send astronauts on increasingly ambitious missions to explore more of the Moon for scientific discovery, economic benefits, and to build a foundation for the first crewed missions to Mars.  

To sustain a long-term presence on the lunar surface, NASA aims to use the Moon’s resources to make products like propellant. Oxygen, a key ingredient of rocket fuel, can be extracted from water ice found in permanently shadowed regions of the Moon. This oxygen would be mined in a gas form, but to be used as a propellant, it must be cooled and condensed into liquid form.   

NASA Glenn experts are using a flight-like cryocooler, developed by Creare LLC through NASA’s Small Business Innovation Research program, to remove heat from the system that extracts the oxygen. This allows the oxygen to condense and remain at extremely cold temperatures below minus 300 degrees Fahrenheit. 

“We’re testing with flight-like hardware to see how oxygen liquefies and how the system responds to different scenarios,” said Wesley Johnson, CryoFILL lead engineer. “These are critical steps toward scaling up and automating future in-situ refueling.” 

Over the course of the next three months, NASA engineers will study how oxygen condenses under various conditions, use the data to validate temperature computer models, and demonstrate how NASA can scale the technology for larger applications. Once the test is complete, the data will inform designs of these technologies for use on the Moon, Mars, or other planetary surfaces. 

The Cryogenic Fluid Management Portfolio Project is a cross-agency team based at NASA Glenn and NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. The cryogenic portfolio’s work is part of NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate and is comprised of more than 20 individual technology development activities.