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Intuitive Machines‘ spacecraft touched down yesterday on the lunar surface . . . sideways. CEO Steve Altemus confirmed during a press conference Friday that, while it wasn’t a perfect landing, it’s nothing short of a miracle the spacecraft landed intact at all. Using a small model of the lander, Altemus demonstrated how engineers believe the spacecraft, called Odysseus, made […]
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Intuitive Machines has landed a spacecraft on the lunar surface, in a historic first for a private company. Flight controllers confirmed the landing at 5:23 PM CST, though the exact condition of the spacecraft is unclear as engineers work to refine their signal with the lander. “What we can confirm without a doubt is that […]
© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Intuitive Machines first mission to the moon is now underway. The company’s Nova-C lander, called Odysseus, lifted off on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in the early hours of Thursday morning. The spacecraft will now embark on a eight-day journey to the moon, with a landing attempt scheduled for February 22. Deployment of @Int_Machines IM-1 […]
© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Masten Space Systems began the process of filing for bankruptcy on Thursday, telling a Delaware court that it owed millions in liabilities to companies including SpaceX, Astrobotic, NuSpace and others.
Masten Space, a startup founded in 2004, had ambitions to send a lander to the Moon as early as next year. The company was selected by NASA under the agency’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program to deliver eight payloads to the lunar surface. That contract was for $75.9 million. The agency also tapped Masten for a separate lunar mission to collect moon-based resource for return to Earth.
More recently, the company said it was developing a GPS-like navigation system for the Moon, part of a contract awarded through the Air Force Research Laboratory’s AFWERX program.
According to the Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection filing, Masten estimated that it had between 50-99 creditors, between $10 million-$50 million in assets, and between $10 million-$50 million in liabilities. The Chapter 11 request was signed by David Masten, President and CTO of the company. The filing breaks down the exact amount Masten owes its creditors: the largest amount to SpaceX, for $4.6 million; $2.7 million to Psionic; $2.7 to Astrobotic; and $1.6 to NuSpace. An additional 16 creditors are listed on the application.
The company will be selling its launch credit with SpaceX (SpaceX was selected to send Masten’s XL-1 lander to the Moon) to Intuitive Machines, one of its competitors.
TechCrunch has reached out to Masten Space for comment and will update the story if it responds. The filing was made in the Delaware Bankruptcy Court, case number 22-10657.
NASA’s big mission to hunt for water on the Moon has slipped by another year, to 2024, due to the agency requesting further testing of lander that will deliver the payload to the lunar surface.
NASA selected Astrobotic as the commercial partner to develop the lander for this mission in 2020, through the agency’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative. While Astrobotic is providing the lander, NASA is developing the rover, VIPER, in-house. VIPER, or the Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover, is tasked with observing and quantifying the presence of ice in the moon’s South Pole, and water underneath the surface.
“The additional tests aim to reduce the overall risk to VIPER’s delivery to the Moon,” NASA said in a statement Tuesday.
This marks the second time the mission has been delayed, after NASA officials said in 2020 that the additional time would be used for “upgrades” to the water-hunting rover.
The mission is a key part of NASA’s Artemis program, which in the short-term aims to return humans to the moon by the middle of the decade. The presence of water could be key in establishing the long-term presence of humans on the lunar surface, and could even play a role in human space exploration into deeper reaches of the solar system.
This is Astrobotic’s second CLPS contract. For the first, awarded in 2019 for $79.5 million, Astrobotic will use a separate, smaller lander, called Peregrine, to deliver payloads to the moon potentially this year. By way of comparison, Peregrine is a little over 6 feet tall and 8 feet wide, with a 120-kilogram capacity. The lander used to deliver VIPER to the Moon, Griffin, is double in height and nearly 15 feet long, with a 500 kilogram capacity.
VIPER will use nearly every bit of Griffin’s payload capacity, coming in at roughly the size of a golf cart and weighing 450 kilograms. To search for ice, NASA is equipping the robot with three instruments and a 3-foot drill capable of analyzing lunar soil. The rover will be able to travel into permanently shadowed – and so very, very cold – regions of the Moon. NASA confirmed the presence of subsurface ice back in 2009, but VIPER’s work will help map where that ice is located and its concentration.
Astrobotic will be receiving an additional $67.8 million for the tests, bringing its total contract value to $320.4 million. The company selected SpaceX to deliver the payload to orbit using a Falcon Heavy rocket.
Masten Space Systems, a startup that’s aiming to send a lander to the moon in 2023, will develop a lunar navigation and positioning system not unlike GPS here on Earth.
Masten’s prototype is being developed as part of a contract awarded through the Air Force Research Laboratory’s AFWERX program. Once deployed, it’ll be a first-of-its-kind off-world navigational system.
Up until this point, spacecraft heading to the moon must carry equipment onboard to detect hazards and assist with navigation. To some extent, it makes sense that a shared navigation network has never been established: Humans have only landed on the moon a handful of times, and while there have been many more uncrewed landings, lunar missions still haven’t exactly been a regular occurrence.
But as the costs of going to orbit and beyond have drastically decreased, thanks in part to innovations in launch technology by companies like SpaceX, space is likely to get a lot busier. Many private companies and national space divisions have set their sights on the moon in particular. Masten is one of them: It was chosen by NASA to deliver commercial and private payloads to a site near the Haworth Crater at the lunar south pole. That mission, originally scheduled for December 2022, was pushed back to November 2023.
Other entities are also looking to go to the moon. Chief amongst them is NASA with its Artemis program, which will send two astronauts to the lunar surface in 2024. These missions will likely only increase in the coming decades, making a common navigation network more of a necessity.
“Unlike Earth, the moon isn’t equipped with GPS so lunar spacecraft and orbital assets are essentially operating in the dark,” Masten’s VP of research and development Matthew Kuhns explained in a statement.
The system will work like this: Spacecraft will deploy position, navigation and timing (PNT) beacons onto the lunar surface. The PNT beacons will enable a surface-based network that broadcasts a radio signal, allowing spacecraft and other orbital assets to wirelessly connect for navigation, timing and location tracking.
Image Credits: Masten Space Systems (opens in a new window)
The company already concluded Phase I of the project, which involved completing the concept design for the PNT beacons. The bulk of the engineering challenge will come in Phase II, when Masten will develop the PNT beacons. They must be able to withstand harsh lunar conditions, so Masten is partnering with defense and technology company Leidos to build shock-proof beacon enclosures. The aim is to complete the second phase in 2023.
“By establishing a shared navigation network on the moon, we can lower spacecraft costs by millions of dollars, increase payload capacity and improve landing accuracy near the most resource-rich sites on the moon,” Kuhns said.
SpaceX is set to send a payload to the Moon in 2023, using its larger (and infrequently used) Falcon Heavy launch vehicle. The mission will fly a lander built by space startup Astrobotic, which itself will be carrying NASA’s VIPER, or Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (this is the agency that loves torturing language to come up with fun acronyms, after all).
The launch is currently set for later in the year, and this would be Falcon Heavy’s first Moon mission if all goes to plan. It would not, however, be SpaceX’s first lunar outing, since the company has booked missions to launch lunar landers as early as 2022 on behalf of both Masten and Intuitive Machines. Those would both employ Falcon 9 rockets, however, at least according to current mission specs. Also, all of the above timelines so far exist only on paper, and in the business of space, delays and schedule shifts are far from unusual.
This mission is an important one for all involved, however, so they’re likely to prioritize its execution. For NASA, it’s a key mission in its longer-term goals for Artemis, the program through which it seeks to return humans to the Moon, and eventually establish a more permanent scientific presence there both in orbit and on the surface. Part of establishing a surface station will rely on using in-situ resources, of which water would be a hugely important one.
Image Credits: Astrobotic
Astrobotic won the contract to deliver VIPER on behalf of NASA last year. The mission profile includes landing the payload on the lunar South Pole, which is the intended target landing area for NASA’s Artemis missions involving human astronauts. The lander Astrobotic is sending for this task is its Griffin model, which is a larger craft vs. its Peregrine lander, giving it the extra space required to carry the VIPER, and making it necessary to use SpaceX’s heavier lift Falcon Heavy launch vehicle.
NASA’s ambitious target of landing astronauts back on the Moon by 2024 is in flux as the new administration looks at timelines and budgets, but it still seems committed to making use of public-private partnerships to pave the way, whenever it does attain that goal. This first Griffin mission, along with an earlier planned Peregrine landing, are part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, which sought private sector partners to build and deliver lunar landers with NASA as one customer.
Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin will be providing NASA with a valuable scientific tool ahead of the U.S. space agency’s goal of returning to the Moon: The ability to run experiments in simulated lunar gravity much closer to home, in suborbital space.
NASA revealed that Blue Origin will be modifying its reusable New Shepard sub-orbital launch vehicle to add Moon gravity approximation via rotation of the spacecraft’s capsule. That’ll effectively turn it into one big centrifuge, which will mean that objects inside will experience a gravitational force very close to that found on the lunar surface.
It’s not like there aren’t already ways to simulate lunar gravity, but the way that New Shepard will implement its system will provide two benefits that none of these existing methods can match: Longer duration, offering over two minutes of continuous artificial Moon gravity exposure, and larger payload capacity, which will unlock experimental capabilities that are currently impossible just due to space restrictions.
Blue Origin anticipates that this new capability for New Shepard will be ready to roll by 2022 – important timing because the whole idea is to help support NASA’s Artemis program, which is its mission series that will see a return to human Moon exploration, including establishment of a more permanent crewed research presence both in lunar orbit and on the surface.
Gravity on the surface of the Moon is about one-sixth as powerful as that here on Earth. NASA also points out that it will require experimentation not only in preparation for lunar missions, but also to support eventually crewed launches to Mars, which has gravity that’s just over one-third as strong as it is here.
Blue Origin is also working with NASA on human landers for its lunar missions, through a space industry team-up that includes Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper.
Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin will be providing NASA with a valuable scientific tool ahead of the U.S. space agency’s goal of returning to the Moon: The ability to run experiments in simulated lunar gravity much closer to home, in suborbital space.
NASA revealed that Blue Origin will be modifying its reusable New Shepard sub-orbital launch vehicle to add Moon gravity approximation via rotation of the spacecraft’s capsule. That’ll effectively turn it into one big centrifuge, which will mean that objects inside will experience a gravitational force very close to that found on the lunar surface.
It’s not like there aren’t already ways to simulate lunar gravity, but the way that New Shepard will implement its system will provide two benefits that none of these existing methods can match: Longer duration, offering over two minutes of continuous artificial Moon gravity exposure, and larger payload capacity, which will unlock experimental capabilities that are currently impossible just due to space restrictions.
Blue Origin anticipates that this new capability for New Shepard will be ready to roll by 2022 – important timing because the whole idea is to help support NASA’s Artemis program, which is its mission series that will see a return to human Moon exploration, including establishment of a more permanent crewed research presence both in lunar orbit and on the surface.
Gravity on the surface of the Moon is about one-sixth as powerful as that here on Earth. NASA also points out that it will require experimentation not only in preparation for lunar missions, but also to support eventually crewed launches to Mars, which has gravity that’s just over one-third as strong as it is here.
Blue Origin is also working with NASA on human landers for its lunar missions, through a space industry team-up that includes Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper.