Forrest Meyen

When it comes to the rare earth elements that we’ll need to build more electric vehicles and electrify our transportation infrastructure, Earth’s resources are extremely limited. And extracting them takes a lot of energy and exacts a high environmental cost. 

Some have begun looking beyond our home planet in the hopes of finding more of these elements. There’s even talk of setting up heavy industry in space. But doing any of that will require sending more astronauts to distant planets and asteroids. And the cost of rocket propellant for deep space travel is currently prohibitively expensive. 

Forrest Meyen, 34, has been passionate all his life about making the dream of more frequent crewed space missions a reality. A cofounder of the space tech company Lunar Outpost, he earned his doctoral degree from MIT in aeronautics and astronautics. Now his work could help make space exploration more affordable and give the space mining industry a boost. 

For the past eight years, he’s been part of the team working on MOXIE, a device about the size of a toaster. MOXIE traveled to Mars aboard NASA’s Perseverance rover in 2021 and successfully converted samples of the Red Planet’s CO2-dominated atmosphere into oxygen. 

It was the first time a robotic system had ever harnessed the natural resources of another planet for potential human use, an important step toward human-led Mars missions.

The same system could someday be used to create rocket propellant for missions returning from Mars, which could save NASA billions of dollars. “It makes travel to Mars and back feasible,” says Meyen, though there are still many other challenges to be worked out—such as how to protect astronauts from the sun’s powerful radiation, and whether it’s possible to grow crops in the planet’s soil. 

Meyen is now concentrating on leading the first moon rover mission with NASA to the lunar south pole, which has never been explored before. That is scheduled to take place later this year. He and his team hope the rover will detect water, which could also be used to create rocket propellant and collect lunar soil samples.