Luxembourg’s ESRIC marks five years as a global hub for space resources, blending research, start-up support, and cutting-edge infrastructure to advance lunar exploration and sustainable tech. Kathryn Hadler, Director of ESRIC since 2022, explains.
Please tell us a bit about your role at ESRIC.
Kathryn Hadler: I am responsible for all of ESRIC’s activities: our research, commercialisation and community building. I was awarded €3.7 million funding through the FNR’s PEARL programme to build a research team dedicated to sustainable and responsible approaches to the use of space resources.
Five years after ESRIC was founded, what were the key turning points that defined the centre’s evolution and credibility within the global space community?
I don’t think there has been one defining point, but instead it has been a steady growth of our activities over 5 years, supported, of course, by LSA, LIST, ESA. Five years ago at its launch, ESRIC was a highly visible presence in the space resources community – I actually watched the launch live on YouTube from the UK out of curiosity before a job at ESRIC was even on my radar. Some of our early activities allowed us to gain momentum quickly, such as organising the annual Space Resources Week conference and the Start-up Support Programme business incubator, which we run in partnership with ESA and Technoport. Building our research capabilities and infrastructure has taken more time, however this year, we are really starting to see a growing momentum in our research; supported by funding from the FNR. A couple of recent highlights include our successful applications to ESA to fly payloads on a lunar gravity parabolic flight and a sounding rocket and a successful application to NASA to receive some (small) Apollo samples that have previously been processed at ESA.
“ESRIC was the world’s first research and innovation centre dedicated to space resources […]”
Kathryn Hadler, Director of ESRIC
ESRIC was founded to position Luxembourg at the forefront of space resources research and innovation. Can you share specific collaborations or breakthroughs that have strengthened Luxembourg’s leadership role?
Luxembourg’s position in space resources has become stronger since ESRIC was launched, even in a growing and evolving field. This is thanks to LSA’s leadership on the global stage, the growing industry ecosystem in Luxembourg and the visibility of ESRIC. ESRIC was the world’s first research and innovation centre dedicated to space resources, and our combination of research, support for early stage ventures and infrastructure, for example Europe’s largest Dusty Thermal Vacuum Chamber will arrive next year, continue to make us unique.
The Dusty Thermal Vacuum Chamber is a great example of collaboration. It is being built by a consortium which includes Luxembourg-based Maana Electric, under an ESA contract, and will be operated by ESRIC once delivered to Belval. We are also enormously excited about the recent arrival of Blue Origin in Luxembourg, and the announcement of their Oasis-1 mission, which will map resources on the Moon such as water ice. We will be supporting this project, and we are looking forward to growing our partnership with Blue Origin.
The space resources landscape has matured rapidly, with growing private-sector participation. What lessons have emerged from supporting start-ups and entrepreneurs in this domain?
Over five years, we have supported 25 start-ups from around the world through the first, remote, pre-incubation phase of the Start-up Support Programme, of which six have been incubated in Technoport in phase two. We are also supporting six companies in our Space Resources Accelerator programme, part of the ESA Business in Space Growth Network (BSGN) accelerator. We have learned a lot from these programmes, and from our engagement with start-ups and entrepreneurs; not least how challenging the space resources domain is. The market in space resources is immature and the timeline is uncertain, and so many start-ups look for terrestrial applications for their business to provide near-term revenue. This can create complexity for a fledgling business, but also creates opportunities to be ready as soon as the market matures. It is certainly a complex balance.
As you celebrate this milestone, how is ESRIC redefining its strategic priorities for the next five years?
In five years, our mission has not changed, and our strategy has not changed, however we have seen a real shift in focus in space resources over the last two years. There has been greater focus on finding, mapping and understating lunar resources, as we see in the ESA Explore2040 strategy, and more global interest in resources such as He-3 and REE. At ESRIC, we are addressing this by growing our activities in resource mapping, while we continue to support the development of technologies that will provide usable resources from space, primarily from the Moon, to support extended duration space exploration.
The “space-for-Earth” narrative is becoming increasingly important. How does ESRIC’s research contribute to solving terrestrial challenges, from sustainable mining to resource efficiency on Earth?
One of the most exciting aspects about space resources for me is that it requires us to think differently about our resources and how we use them. For example, on Earth, we extract minerals, refine the metals that we want, and the rest is waste. On the Moon, we are instead interested in all of the components in the minerals: the oxygen that can be used to support life and the metals can be used to manufacture components and other useful items. We start from the principles of zero waste. In ESRIC, in the FNR PEARL research programme that focuses on sustainable and responsible use of space resources, we are developing waterless mineral separation processes. Water is used at a huge scale in the mining industry for separating minerals. In addition we are working on advanced mapping and sampling for mineral exploration and novel life cycle assessment approaches for technology development, together with colleagues at LIST. On another project, supported by ESA and Airbus, we are demonstrating how the metal alloys left once oxygen has been removed from lunar minerals (or Earth-based equivalents) can be used in additive manufacturing.
“In the next five years, we are looking forward to the realisation of some of our large projects, such as the DTVC […]”
Kathryn Hadler, Director of ESRIC
Talent development has been a cornerstone of ESRIC’s mission. How are you nurturing the next generation of scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs who will carry Europe’s space ambitions forward and what gaps still exist in the skills pipeline?
ESRIC is part of LIST and part of Luxembourg’s research ecosystem. As such, we train the next generation through our PhDs, currently, we have seven, and support Master’s projects from across Europe. In addition, the team is very active in public engagement and school outreach. We have participated in Asteroid Day, the recent Science Festival, Astronomy Day and we have delivered many school lessons as part of the Space Goes to School programme. Over half of the team, which is currently 30 people, have participated in public engagement or school outreach in the last year, and I encourage this as engaging with those outside of our immediate community really challenges some of our ideas and creates new ideas. In terms of gaps, the field of space resources is so broad that we require people from many science and engineering disciplines. In ESRIC we have geologists, chemical engineers, materials scientists, mechanical engineers, aerospace engineers and many more. One of the key challenges is communicating across all of these disciplines. You learn very quickly that we all speak different languages!
Looking ahead to ESRIC’s tenth anniversary, what would success look like to you?
More of the same! In the next five years, we are looking forward to the realisation of some of our large projects, such as the DTVC, to further growth and to continuing to keep Luxembourg at the centre of space resources activities.
How will you celebrate your five-year anniversary?
It’s such a busy time of year, and there are so many other events going on that we decided to celebrate our five-year anniversary during Space Resources Week 2026, which will be from the 4-8 May in LuxExpo. As we will have our space resources community present, it seems like an excellent opportunity to celebrate our achievements and say thank you to our stakeholders, partners, supporters and friends.
