SCOUTING REPORT | SDSU's Moon air, cutting animals, less marriage, 437 Project runners

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A Brookings tech firm is at the heart of NASA’s efforts to establish a long-term settlement on the Moon – a first step to launching a mission to Mars.

AeroFly got its start at South Dakota State University in 2019 when former assistant professor Marco Ciarcia and associate professor Todd Letcher received a NASA research grant to develop drones. The company incorporated in 2021 and continued the work, developing unmanned aircraft primarily for the agriculture sector.

Recruiting SDSU engineering students to work on its designs, AeroFly’s focus expanded to robotics as NASA began moving closer to assembling the technology needed for a Moon settlement. A chief concern of the space agency is creating oxygen from material in the Moon’s surface. The oxygen is plentiful in regolith – the Moon’s surface soil – but it first needed to be extracted.