By Jason Mannet

Inside a giant sphere, the engineers pored over their equipment. Before them stood a silvery metal contraption swathed in colourful wires – a box that they hope will one day make oxygen on the moon.

Once the team vacated the sphere, the experiment began. The box-like machine was now ingesting small quantities of a dusty regolith – a mixture of dust and sharp grit with a chemical composition mimicking real lunar soil.

Soon, that regolith was gloop. A layer of it heated to temperatures above 1,650C. And, with the addition of some reactants, oxygen-containing molecules began to bubble out.

“We’ve tested everything we can on Earth now,” says Brant White, a program manager at Sierra Space, a private company. “The next step is going to the moon.”

Sierra Space’s experiment unfolded at Nasa’s Johnson Space Center in the summer of 2024. It is far from the only such technology that researchers are working on, as they develop systems that could supply astronauts living on a future lunar base.

Those astronauts will need oxygen to breathe but also to make rocket fuel for spacecraft that might launch from the moon and head to destinations further afield – including Mars.

Lunar base inhabitants might also require metal and they could even harvest this from the dusty grey debris that litters the lunar surface.

Much depends on whether we can build reactors able to extract such resources effectively or not.

“It could save billions of dollars from mission costs,” says Mr White as he explains that the alternative – bringing lots of oxygen and spare metal to the moon from Earth – would be arduous and expensive.

Luckily, the lunar regolith is full of metal oxides. But while the science of extracting oxygen from metal oxides, for example, is well understood on Earth, doing this on the moon is much harder. Not least because of the conditions.

The huge spherical chamber that hosted Sierra Space’s tests in July and August this year induced a vacuum and also simulated lunar temperatures and pressures.

The company says it has had to improve how the machine works over time so that it can better cope with the extremely jagged, abrasive texture of the regolith itself. “It gets everywhere, wears out all sorts of mechanisms,” says Mr White.

And the one, crucial, thing that you can’t test on Earth or even in orbit around our planet, is lunar gravity – which is roughly one sixth that of the Earth. It might not be until 2028 or later that Sierra Space can test its system on the moon, using real regolith in low gravity conditions.

The moon’s gravity could be a real problem for some oxygen-extracting technologies unless engineers design for it, says Paul Burke at Johns Hopkins University.

In April, he and colleagues published a paper detailing the results of computer simulations that showed how a different oxygen-extracting process might be hindered by the moon’s relatively feeble gravitational pull. The process under investigation here was molten regolith electrolysis, which involves using electricity to split lunar minerals containing oxygen, in order to extract the oxygen directly.

The problem is that such technology works by forming bubbles of oxygen on the surface of electrodes deep within the molten regolith itself. “It is the consistency of, say, honey. It is very, very viscous,” says Dr Burke.

“Those bubbles aren’t going to rise as fast – and may actually be delayed from detaching from the electrodes.”

There could be ways around this. One could be to vibrate the oxygen-making machine device, which might jiggle the bubbles free.

And extra-smooth electrodes might make it easier for the oxygen bubbles to detach. Dr Burke and his colleagues are now working on ideas like this.

Sierra Space’s technology, a carbothermal process, is different. In their case, when oxygen-containing bubbles form in the regolith, they do so freely, rather than on the surface of an electrode. It means there is less chance of them getting stuck, says Mr White.

Stressing the value of oxygen for future lunar expeditions, Dr Burke estimates that, per day, an astronaut would require the amount of oxygen contained in roughly two or three kilograms of regolith, depending on that astronaut’s fitness and activity levels.

However, a lunar base’s life support systems would likely recycle oxygen breathed out by astronauts. If so, it wouldn’t be necessary to process quite as much regolith just to keep the lunar residents alive.

The real use case for oxygen-extracting technologies, adds Dr Burke, is in providing the oxidiser for rocket fuels, which could enable ambitious space exploration. Obviously the more resources that can be made on the moon the better.

Sierra Space’s system does require the addition of some carbon, though the firm says it can recycle most of this after each oxygen-producing cycle.

Along with colleagues, Palak Patel, a PhD student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, came up with an experimental molten regolith electrolysis system, for extracting oxygen and metal from the lunar soil.

“We’re really looking at it from the standpoint of, ‘Let’s try to minimise the number of resupply missions’,” she says.

When designing their system, Ms Patel and her colleagues addressed the problem described by Dr Burke: that low gravity could impede the detachment of oxygen bubbles that form on electrodes. To counter this, they used a “sonicator”, which blasts the bubbles with sound waves in order to dislodge them.

Ms Patel says that future resource-extracting machines on the moon could derive iron, titanium or lithium from regolith, for example. These materials might help lunar-dwelling astronauts make 3D-printed spare parts for their moon base or replacement components for damaged spacecraft.

The usefulness of lunar regolith does not stop there. Ms Patel notes that, in separate experiments, she has melted simulated regolith into a tough, dark, glass-like material.

She and colleagues worked out how to turn this substance into strong, hollow bricks, which could be useful for building structures on the moon – an imposing black monolith, say. Why not?

By April Lanux

"It's easier to get forgiveness than permission," says John, a software engineer at a financial services technology company. "Just get on with it. And if you get in trouble later, then clear it up."

He's one of the many people who are using their own AI tools at work, without the permission of their IT division (which is why we are not using John's full name).

According to a survey by Software AG, half of all knowledge workers use personal AI tools.

The research defines knowledge workers as "those who primarily work at a desk or computer".

For some it's because their IT team doesn't offer AI tools, while others said they wanted their own choice of tools.

John's company provides GitHub Copilot for AI-supported software development, but he prefers Cursor.

"It's largely a glorified autocomplete, but it is very good," he says. "It completes 15 lines at a time, and then you look over it and say, 'yes, that's what I would've typed'. It frees you up. You feel more fluent."

His unauthorised use isn't violating a policy, it's just easier than risking a lengthy approvals process, he says. "I'm too lazy and well paid to chase up the expenses," he adds.

John recommends that companies stay flexible in their choice of AI tools. "I've been telling people at work not to renew team licences for a year at a time because in three months the whole landscape changes," he says. "Everybody's going to want to do something different and will feel trapped by the sunk cost."

The recent release of DeepSeek, a freely available AI model from China, is only likely to expand the AI options.

Peter (not his real name) is a product manager at a data storage company, which offers its people the Google Gemini AI chatbot.

External AI tools are banned but Peter uses ChatGPT through search tool Kagi. He finds the biggest benefit of AI comes from challenging his thinking when he asks the chatbot to respond to his plans from different customer perspectives.

"The AI is not so much giving you answers, as giving you a sparring partner," he says. "As a product manager, you have a lot of responsibility and don't have a lot of good outlets to discuss strategy openly. These tools allow that in an unfettered and unlimited capacity."

The version of ChatGPT he uses (4o) can analyse video. "You can get summaries of competitors' videos and have a whole conversation [with the AI tool] about the points in the videos and how they overlap with your own products."

In a 10-minute ChatGPT conversation he can review material that would take two or three hours watching the videos.

He estimates that his increased productivity is equivalent to the company getting a third of an additional person working for free.

He's not sure why the company has banned external AI. "I think it's a control thing," he says. "Companies want to have a say in what tools their employees use. It's a new frontier of IT and they just want to be conservative."

The use of unauthorized AI applications is sometimes called 'shadow AI'. It's a more specific version of 'shadow IT', which is when someone uses software or services the IT department hasn't approved.

Harmonic Security helps to identify shadow AI and to prevent corporate data being entered into AI tools inappropriately.

It is tracking more than 10,000 AI apps and has seen more than 5,000 of them in use.

These include custom versions of ChatGPT and business software that has added AI features, such as communications tool Slack.

However popular it is, shadow AI comes with risks.

Modern AI tools are built by digesting huge amounts of information, in a process called training.

Around 30% of the applications Harmonic Security has seen being used train using information entered by the user.

That means the user's information becomes part of the AI tool and could be output to other users in the future.

Companies may be concerned about their trade secrets being exposed by the AI tool's answers, but Alastair Paterson, CEO and co-founder of Harmonic Security, thinks that's unlikely. "It's pretty hard to get the data straight out of these [AI tools]," he says.

However, firms will be concerned about their data being stored in AI services they have no control over, no awareness of, and which may be vulnerable to data breaches.

It will be hard for companies to fight against the use of AI tools, as they can be extremely useful, particularly for younger workers.

"[AI] allows you to cram five years' experience into 30 seconds of prompt engineering," says Simon Haighton-Williams, CEO at The Adaptavist Group, a UK-based software services group.

"It doesn't wholly replace [experience], but it's a good leg up in the same way that having a good encyclopaedia or a calculator lets you do things that you couldn't have done without those tools."

What would he say to companies that discover they have shadow AI use?

"Welcome to the club. I think probably everybody does. Be patient and understand what people are using and why, and figure out how you can embrace it and manage it rather than demand it's shut off. You don't want to be left behind as the organization that hasn't [adopted AI]."

Trimble provides software and hardware to manage data about the built environment. To help its employees use AI safely, the company created Trimble Assistant. It's an internal AI tool based on the same AI models that are used in ChatGPT.

Employees can consult Trimble Assistant for a wide range of applications, including product development, customer support and market research. For software developers, the company provides GitHub Copilot.

Karoliina Torttila is director of AI at Trimble. "I encourage everybody to go and explore all kinds of tools in their personal life, but recognise that their professional life is a different space and there are some safeguards and considerations there," she says.

The company encourages employees to explore new AI models and applications online.

"This brings us to a skill we're all forced to develop: We have to be able to understand what is sensitive data," she says.

"There are places where you would not put your medical information and you have to be able to make those type of judgement calls [for work data, too]."

Employees' experience using AI at home and for personal projects can shape company policy as AI tools evolve, she believes.

There needs to be a "constant dialogue about what tools serve us the best", she says.