A South Dakota company, AeroFly, is developing two NASA-funded auger systems with combined funding of $1.7 million. Under LEONA (Lunar Extraction Of Near-Earth Aquifers), engineers built a 2-meter horizontal auger-dryer prototype scheduled for testing in April, using a vacuum chamber, heated section, simulated regolith, and water ice. Under Rego-LIFT (Lunar ISRU Feedstock Transporter), four 60-centimeter vertical augers are scheduled for parabolic-flight tests in September, followed by a continuous two-week demonstration in July 2027 of a full-scale system designed to lift artificial lunar soil 10 meters.
The prototypes address two critical bottlenecks: releasing volatile water in vacuum while conveying abrasive regolith, and moving feedstock vertically to processing equipment. Water can support life support, radiation shielding, and electrolysis into oxygen and hydrogen; dry regolith can feed molten-regolith electrolysis for oxygen and metals. Failure of these systems would leave a settlement dependent on imported consumables, increasing vulnerability to launch interruption, equipment loss, and geopolitical or terrestrial catastrophe.
The Ark team should track LEONA vacuum-drying performance, recovered-water yield, energy consumed per kilogram, ice-retention losses, auger wear, dust contamination, and fault-recovery behavior. It should also monitor the September reduced-gravity tests and July 2027 two-week Rego-LIFT demonstration, then require independent endurance trials using representative polar regolith and redundant transport paths before integrating augers into habitat or archival-resource designs.