Science City, in Japan.

Two completely different companies are on a mission to see if they can separate moon water into hydrogen and oxygen on the lunar surface.

Not just a dream, the countdown is on.

It's taken Takasago Thermal Engineering four years to dream up this device, a mini-electrolyzer strong enough to survive a trip to the moon.

Adapting the knowledge for extreme conditions in space has been a labor of love, once spearheaded by Takasago engineer Atsushi Kato.

He gave me exclusive access to the lab where the company does fundamental hydrogen research.

Electrolyzer uses a very basic electrochemical reaction.

When we supply electricity and water to a reactor called a cell, the water splits into hydrogen and oxygen.

But you're doing this in space, on the moon.

That's where it makes it difficult, right?

The most difficult point is adaptation for the low gravity.

Because for water electrolyzer, gravity is a very important factor.

But on the moon, gravity is one-sixth compared to that of Earth.

Another challenge, the intense vibrations during liftoff to space.

If the electrolyzer stays intact after the lunar landing, it'll run on energy from the sun that's available for about 10 moon hours a day.

That's about two weeks in Earth time.

Operated remotely, the device will first attempt to make hydrogen from Earth water.

How much water are you bringing?

A few hundred milliliters.

And how much hydrogen are you planning to make if everything goes perfectly?

It's a small amount compared to Earth use.

For the past 100 years, Takasago's ducts and ventilation systems have snaked through the walls of Japan's most iconic buildings.

More than 700 patents later, it now bets green hydrogen will propel the company forward.

Hiroyuki Muraoka is Takasago's executive officer.

We started to study hydrogen almost 20 years ago.

And now we are developing large-scale electrolysis riser.

And what we do in space would give us definite technology and skills to bring more efficient and easy to operate the machine that would differentiate from the competitors.

I need to be realistic.

The electrolyzer is tiny.

Yes.

And to be able to do what you're talking about requires scale.

This is an experimental mission.

Once we've obtained the data, then we start thinking not only by ourselves, with the companies who have interest to doing the business with us.

To get to the moon, Takasago is hitching a ride with a company called iSpace, which joined the world's dash to the moon 11 years ago.

As an early investor, Takasago has secured a seat on iSpace's upcoming second attempt to put a lunar lander on the moon.

The lander is due to launch in a SpaceX rocket in the fourth quarter of 2024.

For more on the company's vision, I caught up with Chief Technology Officer Ryo Uchiie.

We just completed final system environmental test.

Our payloads are also ready for launch.

We carefully selected our landing site to avoid a similar issue in the mission, too.

And, of course, we also improved our software, too.

Can you just tell me a little bit about the physical features of the lander?

The size of the lander is more than two meters.

At the bottom of the lander, we have in total seven propulsion thrusters.

The mass is around one ton.

But surprisingly, almost 70% of the mass is occupied by propellant because in order to make a soft landing, we need to spend a lot of energy to cancel lunar gravity effect and so on.

I'm interested when you say 70% of the mass is propellant because here we are talking about potentially electrolysis on the moon.

And if you can do that, you can make enough hydrogen eventually to maybe fuel these missions so that you don't have to carry so much propellant.

Is that the goal or the dream that we're talking about?

Yeah, yeah, of course.

Not only us, but also the other players interested in lunar water resources.

That hydrogen, oxygen can be like a propellant for spacecraft.

If we make a moon gas station, we can fly far away like Mars and so on.

When it comes to space exploration, Japan touts a public-slash-private sector approach, unlike in other countries that rely heavily on the wealthy.

Earlier this year, the Japanese government launched a $6 billion-plus fund to boost private space ventures.

Rounds of similar initiatives have given newcomers like iSpace the capital to grow.

I spoke with the physicist Hitoshi Murayama about the experiment's viability.

The biggest question is how easy it is to get water on a lunar surface so that people believe that it's actually hidden in the soil.

But you need to actually take that out and separate that for the rest of the junk you don't need.

And so that's the hard part.

But once that's done, then the spreading water into hydrogen and oxygen is a well-understood technique.

How realistic do you think doing something like this is on the moon?

It's possible in principle because you can do it yourself.

So the only question is how efficient the process is.

And right now, relying on the power alone, you do need to actually put a lot of power to actually do that.

A lot of buts and ifs getting there, digging, scaling up on another body to make enough hydrogen for fuel.

But for now, the pursuit is and will keep us all dreaming big.

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology