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An orbital flight test program for a fixed alkaline electrolyte (FAE) electrolyser stack is planned to be performed in September 2003 on board a Spacehab mission. The flight experiment is supposed to demonstrate the readiness of the FAE technology as one essential component to close the oxygen loop on board the ISS by means of an Air Revitalization System, ARES. The paper describes the design of the experiment, the current development status and the intended test program in space and shows its programmatic relation to ARES.

During the last years extensive work has been done to design and develop the Closed Loop Air Revitalization System ARES. The potential of ARES for future space exploration missions is to significantly reduce the water upload demand, increase the safety of the crew by reducing dependency on re-supply flights and, due to the launch mass restraints, make future exploration missions to other planets possible. The ARES demonstrator includes the functions of CO2 concentration, CO2 reduction and oxygen generation. Whereas in previous phases ARES was designed to operate in NODE3 of the ISS, this has been changed to an intended ARES operation in the Russian Multifunctional Laboratory Module MLM. This year’s activities concentrated on process optimization of the Carbon Dioxide Removal Assembly (CCA) interaction with the Sabatier Reactor (CRA), extreme conditions testing, life time tests with the Sabatier Reactor and the oxygen generation stack and system testing.