NASA to award $2.6B in deals for lunar landing
9 companies will vie in effort to return to moon by 2022
Before the United States can return astronauts to the moon, it needs to send robots there first.
As part of that ultimate mission, several lunar lander companies — including Cape Canaveral based Moon Express — were selected to compete for up to $2.6 billion worth of NASA contracts that will fast-track the nation’s return to the moon.
The space agency announced the winners of its Commercial Lunar Payload Services program Thursday at an event at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C. The nine companies will all be eligible to win a slice of the money through contracts over a period of 10 years.
“We are doing something that’s never been done before. When we go to the moon, we want to be one customer of many customers in a robust marketplace between the Earth and the moon and want multiple providers that are competing,” said NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine at the event Thursday. “Welcome to the competition.”
Like NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, which is sending astronauts to space from the U.S. again for the first time in eight years through partnerships with SpaceX and Boeing, CLPS provides taxpayer funds to private companies for missions that signal the nation’s renewed commit-
ment to space exploration. The last time the space agency landed a spacecraft on the moon was in 1972.
With CLPS, NASA will release tasks that the eligible companies can bid to complete, and the amount of money they get will vary task-to-task.
Among the technologies NASA will request is a minimum 1,100-pound lander that can deliver NASA payloads to the moon. It is targeted to launch in 2022. The small payload missions will help the agency better understand the navigation, guidance, landing precision and ultimate long-term survivability for human trips to the moon.
It’ll all be a precursor to the agency requesting larger landers for human moon landings.
NASA also hopes to scout the moon for ice deposits, which it plans to convert to oxygen and hydrogen to create rocket fuel. The landers sent as part of the CLPS program should be able to return samples and prospect for ice and other resources.
Such missions to the lunar surface are expected to begin as early as next year and as late as the end of 2021. The timeline is much shorter than that of the Lunar Gateway, a mini-International Space Station NASA is building to orbit the moon, which won’t host astronauts until about the mid-2020s at the earliest.
The faster timeline is thanks to President Donald Trump’s Space Policy Directive 1, which instructs the agency to join with private companies to lead a human return to the moon — then Mars and beyond.
The companies that won the CLPS contract are:
■ Astrobotic Technology, a Pittsburgh-based company that has built a lander called Peregrine, and that already has backing from NASA to create a standalone system to land on the moon.
■ Deep Space Systems, an aerospace engineering company that worked on the Mars Phoenix lander.
■ Draper, based in Massachusetts, bid to provide payload operations guidance systems for the lunar lander.
■ Firefly Aerospace, which designs, manufactures and operates launch vehicles for the small satellite and payload market.
■ Intuitive Machines, based in Texas, and specializing in autonomous systems.
■ Lockheed Martin, which already has plans for a massive lander that could ferry four astronauts from the Lunar Gateway to the moon.
■ Masten Space Systems, which has a fleet of lunar landers that it plans to send to the moon in 2021.
■ Moon Express, based in Cape Canaveral, which also has a host of landers that vary in size and capability.
■ Orbit Beyond, a New Jersey-based company building spacecraft it expects to send to the moon by 2020.
Left out were major players, including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, which is in the conceptual design phase for a large lunar lander called “Blue Moon.”
Laura Seward Forczyk, owner of space consulting firm Astrolytical, said NASA likely didn’t choose SpaceX or United Launch Alliance, either, because it opted to go with smaller companies that are working specifically on technology for the lunar surface, rather than mostly rockets.
‘A very good day’
For Moon Express, an 8-year-old company that moved to the Cape in 2015, the contract is a major win, bolstering its plans to eventually mine for resources on the lunar surface.
The company recently got $12.5 million in funding, but due to financial turmoil and a lost lawsuit against former partner Intuitive Machines (that Moon Express is appealing), the NASA contract was crucial.
“That call I got from NASA was, yes, a very good day,” President and CEO Bob Richards said in an interview with the Orlando Sentinel.
Thanks to CLPS, Richards said Moon Express hopes to announce a mission in early 2019 with the hope of going to the moon in 2020.
To do it, Moon Express has partnered with spacecraft company Sierra Nevada, thermal engineering experts Paragon Space Development Corporation, flight software company Odyssey Space Research and NanoRacks, which will provide sales, marketing, management and technical support.
Richards said Moon Express’ engines, software and structures for its MX-1E lander are “very mature” and he expects to be ready to start integrating the structures as soon as NASA gives it the green light for a mission.
“The opportunity we have now is of actually executing on what I think is an important exploration architecture,” Richards said.