Tech Today: NASA Moonshot Launches Commercial Fuel Cell Industry

The agency’s technology development has prepared fuel cells for use in future renewable energy networks.

NASA’s investment in fuel cells dates back to the 1960s, when most of the world was still dependent on fossil fuels. A fuel cell generates electricity and heat when hydrogen and oxygen combine via an electrolyte. Because its only byproduct is water, it is an environmentally friendly source of energy.

The agency’s interest in fuel cells came about when NASA needed fuel for a mission to the moon. Engineers at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston turned to fuel cells because they could deliver more energy per pound than batteries over a long mission. At the time, fuel cells were just a concept that had never been used in practice.

NASA funded three companies, including some Pratt & Whitney, to develop prototypes. For the Apollo fuel cells, NASA selected the Pratt & Whitney group, which would become UTC Power, to supply all of the space shuttle fuel cells. With the agency funding and shaping its technology development, UTC Power eventually began offering commercial fuel cells. The company is now known as HyAxiom Inc., operating out of the same facility in South Windsor, Connecticut, that produced the agency’s fuel cells.

The company introduced its first commercial fuel cell in the mid-1990s and its current product line about a decade later.

“The models they built for the products we use today are based on a lot of electrochemistry knowledge gained from the space program,” said Sridhar Kanuri, chief technology officer at HyAxiom.

HyAxiom currently produces about 120 units per year, but expects to increase production as government investment in fuel cells increases. The U.S. government plans to use fuel cells to store energy from renewable sources.

Today’s commercial fuel cell companies got much of their knowledge from NASA. John Scott, NASA’s chief technologist for power and energy storage, said, “All of these companies trace their intellectual property, their corporate heritage, even generations of personnel back to these companies that NASA funded in the early 1960s.”