A. Ignatiev

Papers

Total Citations

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About

A. Ignatiev is a pioneering figure in space resource utilization and in-situ manufacturing, with a career dedicated to making off-world settlement a practical reality. His foundational work, including the highly cited "Space Resources Roundtable 2" (2000, 31 citations), helped define the roadmap for extracting and using materials from the Moon, Mars, and asteroids. He is perhaps best known for his visionary concept of manufacturing solar cells directly on the lunar surface, detailed in his influential 2005 paper (22 citations). This work demonstrated that lunar regolith could be melted into glass substrates and used to create thin-film solar cells, effectively proposing a self-sustaining power infrastructure for a lunar base. By experimentally proving that evaporated lunar soil can serve as both an antireflective coating and an insulator, Ignatiev provided a critical proof-of-concept for "living off the land" in space. His research has profoundly shaped the field of planetary engineering, inspiring a generation of researchers to consider the Moon not just as a destination, but as a source of raw materials for building a permanent human presence beyond Earth.