The Exploration Company has announced that it will test a lunar hopper demonstrator named ONEIROS in the United Arab Emirates in 2027, according to European Spaceflight. The privately funded project is intended to validate technologies that could eventually bring down the cost of reaching the lunar surface. The company plans to build a one-tonne demonstrator that will fly a throttleable methane-fuelled rocket engine together with autonomous navigation and hazard-avoidance systems, demonstrating the capabilities required for controlled landings on the Moon.
Why it matters
Landing on the Moon remains expensive and technically demanding, and the technologies ONEIROS is meant to prove out sit at the centre of that problem. A vehicle that can throttle its engine, navigate itself and avoid hazards on the way down is a prerequisite for the kind of controlled, repeatable landings that lower-cost lunar access depends on. By testing those systems on Earth first, The Exploration Company aims to retire technical risk before committing to flight on the lunar surface. The choice of the UAE as the test location also points to a wider effort to build up local testing infrastructure outside Europe.
Work began this year, with breadboards already built
Details of the project appear in the abstract of a paper presented at the 77th International Astronautical Congress in Antalya, Türkiye. According to that abstract, work on ONEIROS started earlier this year, and teams have already assembled several breadboards as a way of reducing technical risk ahead of the planned flight demonstration next year. The abstract also confirmed that the testing would take place in what it described as the UAE desert.
The decision to hold the flight demonstration in the United Arab Emirates follows a memorandum of understanding signed with the country's national space agency, under which the agency would support the project and help develop local testing capabilities. European Spaceflight reports that no subsequent binding agreement has been announced.
From ONEIROS to Hilal to Nyx Moon
The Exploration Company does not intend ONEIROS to be an end in itself. The company plans to follow it with Hilal, a demonstrator designed to validate precision landing capabilities and methane/oxygen propulsion technologies on the Moon's surface. After that, the company intends to proceed with its full-scale Nyx Moon lander.
The sequence suggests a step-by-step approach: prove the engine, navigation and hazard-avoidance systems in a terrestrial setting with ONEIROS, then test precision landing and propulsion on the lunar surface with Hilal, before scaling up to the full Nyx Moon vehicle. Each stage is meant to answer questions the previous one leaves open.
A separate role in an ESA-backed lunar shelter study
Beyond its own lander programmes, The Exploration Company is part of a consortium that the European Space Agency selected in February 2026 to carry out a Lunar Remote Camp study. The consortium is led by SAGA Space Architects, a Danish firm, and is working on a concept for a deployable lunar shelter. Under the concept, the shelter would initially support robotic operations, with the possibility of hosting astronauts during short stays on the lunar surface.
That study runs alongside the company's lander work rather than replacing it, and it places The Exploration Company in a second area of lunar surface planning: not just how to get to the Moon, but what would be waiting there once missions arrive.
What to watch next is whether a binding agreement with the UAE space agency follows the memorandum of understanding, and whether the ONEIROS flight demonstration stays on schedule for 2027.
