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The Hill
13-04-2025
- Science
- The Hill
Commercial space companies are ready for the next stage of lunar exploration
Recently, some of the players in the Commercial Lunar Payload Services program met with the House Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics, part of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee. The witnesses included representatives from NASA administration, Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, Astrobotic Technology, Intuitive Machines and Firefly Aerospace. Intuitive Machines made a 'partially successful' lunar landing in March after a similar attempt in February 2024. Firefly Aerospace conducted an entirely successful lunar landing also in March 2025. Astrobotic failed its first lunar landing attempt in January 2024. The hearing covered two main topics. The first was what to do with the NASA VIPER lunar rover. The second was a discussion of the possibility of a Commercial Lunar Payload Services 2.0. VIPER, or Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover, was planned by NASA to be delivered by an Astrobotic Griffin lander to the moon's south pole. It would trundle across the lunar surface with a drill and a suite of instruments, searching for ice. NASA abruptly canceled the rover in July 2024, citing cost overruns. The VIPER is essentially finished and needs only some more testing before it is sent to the moon. The decision elicited cries of outrage from both the scientific and commercial space communities. Some demanded that the project be revived through a commercial partnership. Intuitive Machines developed a plan to do just that, using one of its planned landers. NASA finally put out some requests for proposals for plans to deliver the VIPER to the moon with a commercial partnership. The space agency stated that it will respond sometime in the summer of 2025. Members of the subcommittee expressed exasperation with NASA's decision to cancel VIPER, according to Space News. Nicola Fox, the associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate, defended the decision, stating that moving forward with the lunar rover would have adversely affected the funding of several future Commercial Lunar Payload Services missions. Brett W. Denevi, the principal staff scientist at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, expressed skepticism about the commercial partnership approach. 'We should not expect VIPER science to happen by hoping that someone will offer to fly and operate it on their own dime,' he said. He stated that Congress must come up with the extra money lest China become the first country to prospect for water ice on the moon. On the subject of Commercial Lunar Payload Services and its future, the three representatives of the commercial lunar lander companies were filled with praise for the program and would like more of the same. The current program lasts through 2028. A Commercial Lunar Payload Services 2.0 would continue and expand the program that has NASA helping to finance commercial moon landings. Steve Altemus, president and CEO of Intuitive Machines, suggested that Commercial Lunar Payload Services 2.0. would start delivering 'infrastructure' to the lunar surface. Infrastructure means habitats, rovers, power sources and everything else that would support the long-term exploration and development of the moon. By 2028, if NASA's plans hold up, the Artemis III mission should have already taken place. A Human Landing System derived from the SpaceX Starship will have delivered two astronauts and their equipment to the lunar surface. With the Starship human landing systems' ability to carry 100 to 150 metric tons to the moon, the first two moonwalkers since 1972 will have a lot of stuff coming with them. The advent of the Starship human landing system could provide a lot of opportunities for commercial companies. It could be that Artemis III will leave behind robots provided by commercial companies to continue the work of the next moonwalkers when they leave the lunar surface. The opportunity presented by the Starship human landing system depends on NASA following through with the Artemis return to the moon program and not pursuing the pivot to Mars that Elon Musk advocates. The moon is an opportunity for science, economic development and political soft power (i.e., beating China.) Fortunately, Jared Isaacman, the billionaire entrepreneur who Trump nominated to be NASA administrator, has expressed his full support for a return to the moon before the end of the current presidential term. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee that oversees NASA, agreed on X, stating, 'The moon mission MUST happen in President Trump's term or else China will beat us there and build the first moonbase.' Isaacman also noted during testimony at his confirmation hearings that while Mars is a priority, 'Along the way, we will inevitably have the capabilities to return to the Moon and determine the scientific, economic, and national security benefits of maintaining a presence on the lunar surface.' Commercial Lunar Payload Services companies can play a continuing role in the opening of the lunar frontier. Mark R. Whittington, who writes frequently about space policy, has published a political study of space exploration entitled ' Why is It So Hard to Go Back to the Moon? ' as well as ' The Moon, Mars and Beyond,' and, most recently, ' Why is America Going Back to the Moon? ' He blogs at Curmudgeons Corner.
New York Times
07-03-2025
- Science
- New York Times
Texas Company's Lander Dies on Moon the Day After Toppled Landing
A day after landing on the moon, the robotic Athena spacecraft built by Intuitive Machines of Houston is dead. In an update on its website on Friday, the company confirmed that Athena had tipped onto its side — the same fate that befell its first lunar lander, Odysseus, last year. With its solar panels unable to face the sun, the spacecraft's batteries could not recharge. The company said it did not expect the spacecraft to revive. Before the spacecraft fell silent, 'mission controllers were able to accelerate several program and payload milestones,' Intuitive Machines said. It did not provide details about what had been accomplished. As of early Friday afternoon, NASA has not yet commented publicly about the premature conclusion of the mission, which was supposed to last 10 days until the darkness of lunar night fell over that part of the moon. The mission was part of a NASA program known as Commercial Lunar Payload Services, or CLPS, to contract private companies to carry science instruments and technology demonstrations to the moon at a lower cost. Another robotic spacecraft that is part of CLPS, the Blue Ghost lander by Firefly Aerospace of Cedar Park, Texas, touched down on Sunday and is conducting science experiments on another part of the moon. Athena landed on Thursday on a flat-topped mountain named Mons Mouton, about 100 miles from the moon's south pole. It was the southernmost landing site of any spacecraft. The spacecraft ended up about 150 miles from the targeted landing site, the company said. Athena was carrying payloads for NASA and commercial customers, including three rovers, a rocket-powered drone and a drill meant to poke into the lunar soil in search of water ice. Soon after the landing, it became clear that the spacecraft was not working as expected. At a post-landing news conference, Steve Altemus, the chief executive of Intuitive Machines, portrayed the tribulations in a positive light. 'Any time that you ship a spacecraft to Florida for flight and end up a week later operating on the moon, I declare that a success,' he said. Investors do not appear to agree. Shares of Intuitive Machines, a publicly traded company, fell 20 percent on Thursday and continued to decline at the start of trading on Friday. At noon on Friday, the company's stock was trading under $9, down from more than $13 when the stock market opened on Thursday. Nicola Fox, the associate administrator for NASA's science mission directorate, also tried to put a positive spin on the discouraging results. 'Our goal is to set American companies up to establish a lunar economy on the surface,' she said. 'And that means that even if it doesn't land perfectly, we always learn lessons that we can provide and use in the future.' But the quick death of Athena again raises questions about the soundness of NASA's strategy. So far, four CLPS missions have been launched. Only Sunday's landing of the Blue Ghost spacecraft by Firefly appears to be a complete success. The two landers sent by Intuitive Machines both landed in working condition but toppled over and failed to accomplish most of their science goals. The fourth CLPS mission, by Astrobotic Technology of Pittsburgh, missed the moon entirely last year when the propulsion system of its Peregrine spacecraft malfunctioned soon after launch. 'You really hope that there's at least two companies that are successful,' said Thomas Zurbuchen, who preceded Dr. Fox as the head of the science mission directorate and who set up CLPS in 2017. 'I hope it's more.' But Dr. Zurbuchen has said from the start that perhaps half of the missions would fail as companies figured out how to take smart risks in building cheaper spacecraft. The almost flawless success of Blue Ghost demonstrates that lunar missions with cheaper price tags are feasible. NASA paid $101 million to Firefly to deliver $44 million worth of science experiments. For Athena, NASA agreed to pay Intuitive Machines $62.5 million for the delivery service to Mons Mouton. The intertwining of business relationships among Athena's payloads suggest that the goal of spurring a profitable lunar economy is not entirely fantastical. Nokia, for example, had won a NASA contract to deploy a 4G LTE cellphone network on the moon. Nokia then hired a company, Lunar Outpost of Golden, Colo., to build a rover that would move a cellphone antenna varying distances from the Athena lander as part of the tests of the technology, which would provide an upgrade from UHF radio for lunar communications. Lunar Outpost then sold space on its rover to other commercial customers. In a statement, Nokia said its system was successfully turned on after landing, and operated for about 25 minutes. 'Unfortunately, Nokia was unable to make the first cellular call on the moon due to factors beyond our control that resulted in extreme cold temperatures on our user device modules,' the statement said. If the CLPS deliveries continue to fail, commercial companies and NASA might turn leery of sending more packages. One of the key NASA instruments carried by Athena was a drill built by Honeybee Robotics, a subsidiary of Blue Origin. Interest in the moon was rekindled a couple of decades ago after the discovery of frozen water in shadowed craters near the poles. By analyzing soil and rock up to three feet below the surface, NASA hoped to gain new insight into how much water is actually there and how easily it might be dug up and used by future astronauts. But now NASA will have to decide whether to spend millions of dollars more for another drill to gather that information. NASA already owns an identical drill that is installed on the Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover, or VIPER. The golf-cart-size rover was slated to also land on Mons Mouton on Astrobotic's next CLPS mission. But the space agency announced last year that it wanted to cancel VIPER, even though it had already spent $450 million and the rover's construction and testing were almost complete. The space agency has since called companies for proposals to send the rover to the moon at no additional cost to NASA.
New York Times
27-02-2025
- Science
- New York Times
NASA Hitches a Ride to the Moon to Map Water for Astronauts
The moon is not bone dry, scientists now know. But how many drops of water will thirsty astronauts find? No one knows for sure. A robotic NASA spacecraft called Lunar Trailblazer, which launched Wednesday night from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, is aiming to provide a detailed map from orbit of the abundance, distribution and form of water across the moon. Lunar Trailblazer tagged along for the ride to space on the same SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket as Athena, a commercial lunar lander built by Intuitive Machines of Houston, which will deploy a NASA instrument to drill in the moon and sniff for water vapors. Athena will study one spot on the moon. Lunar Trailblazer will provide a global picture of water on the moon. 'That's another exciting thing for us as we get more science into space with one launch,' Nicola Fox, the associate administrator for NASA's science mission directorate, said during a news conference before the launch. Less than an hour after liftoff, Lunar Trailblazer and Athena went their separate ways. Athena is taking a direct path to the moon, with landing scheduled for March 6, while Lunar Trailblazer set off on a meandering but fuel-efficient journey that will take four months to reach its destination. After it enters orbit, the spacecraft will make observations for at least two years. One area of interest is water in the moon's sunlit regions. 'Does it change as a function of time of day?' Bethany Ehlmann, a professor of planetary science at the California Institute of Technology who serves as the mission's principal investigator, said in an interview. 'You could think about it as almost like a frost coming and going.' For decades, the moon has been regarded as a world devoid of water. But beginning in the mid-1990s, spacecraft found evidence of ice in the eternal shadows of craters in the moon's polar regions. In 2009, NASA slammed a rocket stage into one of the craters. The distinct color signatures of water were seen in the debris kicked up by the impact, confirming the earlier hints. That same year, scientists made a surprising discovery that water was observed not just inside the polar craters, but also all around the moon. That came from observations of reflected light by a NASA instrument aboard Chandrayaan-1, India's first lunar orbiter. If water is somehow more widespread, that could ease future settlement of the moon, especially if significant amounts of water could be easily extracted from the soil. The water molecules could then be split to produce oxygen, for breathable air for astronauts. Hydrogen and oxygen can also be used to fuel rockets or generate power. However, the instrument aboard the Indian spacecraft, designed to identify minerals on the surface, did not quite cover the swath of wavelengths needed to identify how the water was arranged. The molecules could have been stacked as crystals of ice or stuck to the surface of minerals — what scientists call adsorbed. Those forms of water would probably not be very difficult to collect. But the signal might also point to hydroxyl, a molecular group consisting of one hydrogen atom and one oxygen atom, as opposed to the two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom of water. Hydroxyl would most likely be trapped inside rocks but could be released as water if heated to about 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit or more. That would require energy-guzzling ovens to bake piles of rock. Lunar Trailblazer is carrying a scientific sensor, built by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, that is similar to the one that was aboard Chandrayaan-1. But the new instrument is more advanced and covers all of the wavelengths needed to differentiate between ice, adsorbed water and hydroxyl. The instrument can even make observations in the shadowed regions of the moon, which are not completely dark because sunlight often bounces indirectly into the crater. 'That is the most fun part,' Dr. Ehlmann said. 'It's effectively a sort of double bounce of light.' A second instrument, built by the University of Oxford in England, will measure the temperature of the surface. 'The two instruments work together to get this simultaneous data set of water temperature and mineral composition all at the same time at the same place,' Dr. Ehlmann said. Lunar Trailblazer is one in a series of lower-cost, higher-risk robotic science missions by NASA. The cost of building and operating the spacecraft is $94 million. But as a secondary payload on the Intuitive Machines mission, the cost of getting to space was only $8 million, much less than if NASA had purchased a rocket just to launch Lunar Trailblazer. It is the third mission to launch from a program called Small, Innovative Missions for Planetary Exploration, or SIMPLEX. The first two failed once they got to space. Two other SIMPLEX spacecraft lost their ride when problems with NASA's Psyche spacecraft delayed the launch and changed the trajectory. One of those, Janus, which was to study asteroids, was canceled. The other, ESCAPADE, which is to measure the magnetic fields of Mars, was then moved to the debut launch of New Glenn, the orbital rocket from Blue Origin, the space company founded by Jeff Bezos. But that mission was moved off when it appeared that New Glenn would not be ready in time to meet a tight launch window to send it on a specific path to Mars. It is still waiting for its launch. Lunar Trailblazer also experienced travel changes. It was originally slated to ride along with the Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe mission, or IMAP, but was then moved to the Intuitive Machines launch as the IMAP mission faced a delay. 'Lunar Trailblazer is being conducted in a fortunate time,' Dr. Ehlmann said, 'because there's a lot of interest in the moon, meaning there are opportunities to get a ride to the moon.'
