Space Odyssey: From Rocket Engines to Hair Dryers and Back Again

Lolan Naicker explains his unconventional career path to Adam Duckett, from daydreaming in lectures to a £150k win for a lunar water system

IT’S BEEN a wild couple of months for Lolan Naicker. He’s seen shadowy evidence that a rocket engine he designed years ago has landed on the Moon and won £150,000 (US$200,000) for inventing a prototype system that astronauts could use to make water from lunar soil.

What is now his day job – adapting and inventing systems for use beyond Earth – began as idle musings during his chemical engineering studies in South Africa.

“I used to think: how are all these principles applied if you operate on another planet? These distillation columns have terrestrial gravity embedded in the design correlation coefficients. How do you separate that out? How do you work with raw materials on another planet? I was daydreaming about all of this stuff while I was sitting in my lectures.”

But working in the space industry seemed unattainable for a student in a country with no space industry. How could he get there when it was all happening abroad?

Well, it may have taken 20 years, but Lolan found a way. He’s meandered through sectors and roles, yet throughout it all his chemical engineering education has served him well.

“Those core skills in understanding the transformation and processing of matter were applicable almost wherever I went.

“I went to work at a space propulsion company doing rocket engineering design. I treated a chemical propulsion system as a mini process plant, but no one else really thought about it like that. Most people had a mechanical engineering background. I had Perry’s [Chemical Engineer’s Handbook] open next to me using the same correlations. It’s the same theory, just applying it to different hardware.”

But it took many years – and degrees – for Lolan to “bend the arc” of his career towards space.

His initial choice to study chemical engineering came very late. He didn’t know any scientists or engineers, but the country has a prominent chemical and mining sector.

“I guess I got used to the concept of petrochemical plants because I grew up in sight of one on the east coast.”

But what South Africa didn’t have was student loans. If your parents couldn’t pay, you had to find a sponsor.

“I managed to find funding from a petrochemical company called Sasol, based on good school results.

“That’s how I ended up in chemical engineering.”

Paying it back