Maana Electric

Maana Electric builds the TerraBox, a factory in shipping containers that takes in sand and electricity and puts out solar panels. About six twenty-foot containers make up one unit, fully automated, with a first prototype rated at a megawatt of panels per year. The idea points in two directions: deserts on Earth first, then the Moon, where the same machine would eat regolith instead of sand.

Joost van Oorschot founded the company in Luxembourg in 2018, inside the country's push to become Europe's space resources hub, with support from ESA and the national space agency. The stated long game is to be the utility company of the solar system.

The claims run ahead of what can be checked. In 2023 the company announced purchase orders worth over a hundred million euros; it has never named the customer, no delivery has been announced since, and every substantive claim about the business traces to the company itself, which by public records remains a small team. Its registry filings are current and it appears in ESA and ESRIC programs through 2025. What is missing is independent confirmation that the order book, or a commercial TerraBox, exists.