Anick spaces and Kac-Moody groups

For primes p >= 5 we prove an approximation to Cohen, Moore and Neisendorfer's conjecture that the loops on an Anick space retracts off the double loops on a mod-p Moore space. The approximation is then used to answer a question posed by Kitchloo regarding the topology of Kac-Moody groups. We show that, for certain rank-2 Kac-Moody groups K , the based loops on K is p-locally homotopy equivalent to the product of the loops on a 3-sphere and the loops on an Anick space.