We are proud to announce that a SEMS research team has been awarded £30k in seed funding by the UK Space Agency's Aqualunar Challenge competition for water purification on the Moon.

Our winning contribution, the only proposal coming from a team of Chemical Engineers, was recently featured in The Guardian along with the other nine winners.

Three grand prize winners will then be announced in March 2025, winning a combined total of £300,000 to take innovations further.

The Queen Mary AquaLunarPure team includes Dr Edo Boek (PI) and Dr Stoyan Smoukov (co-I), PhD students Farid Bustos and Jincheng Wu, PDRA Dr Yuchen Si and Visiting Professors Onno Kramer and Ian Collins.

The team is developing a reactor that heats lunar ice to leave behind solid material, which is then heated to over 373°C and pressurised to over 218 bar to turn it into “supercritical water”, removing contaminants by oxidation.

Although the seed funding is limited, this appears to be a high profile award. So far, we have been interviewed by IChemE (The Chemical Engineer journal) and YouTube channel "The Angry Astronaut".