<div><div><p>Engineer Lourens Boot is using a stateof-the-art textile to mimic the water cycle and generate new sources of clean water for agriculture and drinking.</p></div></div>

- Juliana Pignataro

In honor of the 50th anniversary of NASA astronauts landing on the moon, Newsweek is spotlighting pioneers in science and technology, highlighting their very own moonshots and how they hope to change the world.

Lourens Boot is the co-founder and CEO of Sponsh, a Dutch company that aims to generate water from one of the world’s most abundant resources: the air around us. A finalist for the Mohammed bin Rashid Initiative for Global Prosperity’s Sustainable Energy challenge, Sponsh wants to solve the world’s pressing water-shortage problems.

What is your moonshot?

Our moonshot is to provide affordable water for everyone around the globe.

What’s the big problem you set out to solve?

We all know that water is the source of life. Without water, everything stops. But we also know that it’s getting scarcer and scarcer every year. We want to tackle that by providing water from an untapped reservoir: the air around us.

How does that work?

We use coated textile. On a nano level, it has little hairs on it. When it’s cold, the hairs stand out and absorb H20 molecules from the air. As the temperature rises, the hairs curl up again and let go of the water. Using the cycles of day and night and temperature changes, the textile repeatedly swells up with water, then releases it. Yo