For decades, NASA has screened every material that flies on crewed missions with a test called NASA-STD-6001B. You hold a six-inch flame to the bottom of a vertically mounted sample. If it burns past six inches, or drips burning debris, the material fails. The test is done in normal Earth gravity, with normal buoyancy, in a room where everyone agrees which way is up.
Nobody has ever run that test on the Moon.
That is the gap at the center of a research program that NASA Glenn, Johnson Space Center, and Case Western Reserve University have been building toward for years. The experiment that will finally close it, Flammability of Materials on the Moon, or FM2, is scheduled to launch in late 2026 on a Commercial Lunar Payload Service mission. The first time anyone burns something deliberately on another planetary body. NASA Combustion Science
The question it is designed to answer is not academic. On Earth, gravity drives a process called blowoff. Hot gases rise from a flame, pulling fresh oxygen to the base. In marginal cases, this flow can actually extinguish the fire. In lunar gravity, at one-sixth of Earth, that flow still exists, but it is much slower. The oxygen gets supplied to the flame without enough velocity to blow it out. Materials that would fail to sustain a flame on Earth might burn for a very long time on the Moon. Paul Ferkul, principal investigator for FM2 at NASA Glenn, has described lunar gravity as a Goldilocks zone for fire: not zero-g where flames form slow spheres and depend entirely on ventilation, and not 1-g where blowoff keeps marginal fires in check. Just enough gravity to keep a flame fed, not enough to knock it out. NASA Houston We Have a Podcast
LUCI, the Lunar Combustion Investigation, provided the first real data. It flew on a Blue Origin New Shepard sounding rocket in 2025, using the rocket's spin to simulate lunar gravity for extended periods. Blue Origin NS-29 Mission The results, presented at the American Society for Gravitational and Space Research conference in December 2025, showed flames surviving at lower oxygen concentrations than they would on Earth. The physics Ferkul's team had modeled for decades held up in hardware. NASA NTRS - Lunar Combustion Investigation LUCI was a stepping stone to FM2; the bridge itself is still under construction.
That bridge will provide minutes of data from a self-contained chamber burning four solid fuel samples on the lunar surface, instrumented with cameras, radiometers, and oxygen sensors. That is four orders of magnitude more observation time than a five-second drop tower test and meaningfully different from the 25 seconds available on a parabolic flight. It is also the only place in the solar system where this experiment can be run, because only the Moon has 1/6g and an accessible surface.
The crew safety question is not hypothetical. Artemis surface missions, the habitats, the suits, the cargo, are being built with materials that passed NASA-STD-6001B. The standard has a known applicability gap for partial-g environments. The SoFIE program on the International Space Station has been systematically addressing microgravity combustion for years, and NASA has long acknowledged that the 1-g test may not be conservative in low-gravity conditions. NASA SoFIE The NESC published guidance in March 2026 on flammability testing for barrier materials designed for spaceflight applications. What nobody has is data from the actual lunar environment.
FM2 launches in late 2026. Artemis crewed lunar surface landings, under current schedules, begin before that. The sequence matters. NASA is aware of the gap and has prioritized the experiment. This is not a case of an agency ignoring a known risk. But the answer to whether the current flammability standard is actually safe for the Moon arrives after the first Moon habitats are already built and inhabited. Whether that timing is acceptable, or whether it requires rethinking the test standard before landing, is the unresolved question FM2 is designed to answer.
Ferkul has been working combustion science at NASA Glenn for forty years. The drop towers, the parabolic flights, the Saffire experiments on departing Cygnus vehicles, the ISS runs with SoFIE. All of it has been building toward this. "We want to make sure we nail that," he said in a May 2025 NASA podcast, referring to the ground-to-ISS-to-Moon progression of combustion research. FM2 is the last step. It launches in roughly two years, give or take a CLPS schedule. The Moon is not waiting.
