Soon there will be a lot of companies on the Ispace lander. Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic plans to send its Peregrine Lander to the maiden flight of his Vulcan Centaur rocket for the United Launch Alliance, which may launch in June. Houston-based Intuitive Machines sent two of his Nova-C landers to the moon this year, and he plans to send another in 2024. Other companies such as Firefly Aerospace and Draper will aim their own landers to the moon in the next few years. SpaceIL will make another attempt to send his Beresheet 2 in 2025. And Astrobotic and Ispace are already considering more ambitious landers to follow on from their original designs.
After years of hype, it looks like the commercial lunar market is finally starting to take off. For example, Astrobotic’s first lander will carry payloads from 16 clients. Among them are the Mexican Space Agency’s small robot, the German Aerospace Center’s radiation detector, and the Carnegie Mellon University’s MoonArk, an art project similar to the Golden Record aboard the Voyager spacecraft. Firefly’s first lander, called Blue Ghost, will bring his two payloads from Honeybee Robotics (acquired by Blue Origin last year). This includes an instrument called the Lunar PlanetVac for sampling soil and a device in his Aegis Aerospace that assesses how regolith debris adheres. material surface.
“I think this is a strong market signal. We want our competitors to be successful as well as our own mission,” said Tim Crane, chief technology officer at Intuitive Machines. A successful lunar mission could eventually lay the groundwork for a commercial Mars lander, he says.
Still, while the number of private space transportation customers is growing, the growing market is largely driven by NASA through its Commercial Lunar Payload Services program. About twice a year, NASA calls for bids to provide science payloads (or technology developments in some cases) it hopes to ship to specific lunar locations by specific dates. . Businesses then bid on those transportation services. In 2019, NASA utilized Astrobotic and Intuitive Machines for such deliveries. Each order is worth about $100 million on average, and NASA’s contracts to date have totaled about $1 billion, said deputy program manager Ryan Stephan. One of his ultimate goals, he says, is to help revitalize this new industry. “While our focus today is on the mission’s scientific return, a key benefit of this project is developing this commercial lunar economy,” he says.
NASA’s largest CLPS contract to date is worth about $330 million and includes delivering the agency’s Viper lunar rover to the lunar South Pole in November 2024.
Firefly’s second Blue Ghost is scheduled to bring NASA’s low-frequency radio telescope, LuSEE-Night, to the far side of the Moon in 2026. It will also deploy the European Space Agency’s Lunar Pathfinder communications satellite into lunar orbit.
