John Walker Moosbrugger sat in front of the company's clean room and watched as an instrument older than him was attached to a moon landers. The vehicle was large enough to fit in a hot tub and had foil wrapped around it. The instrument was designed to study how a landing on the moon affects the atmosphere. Private companies are scrambling to send up many missions after years of preparation, including the upcoming launch of Peregrine. Since its founding in 2007, Astrobotic has been working on its landers and has signed deals with companies that want to put instruments on it. NASA came calling with a funding scheme to turn Astrobotic into a moon ferry by the middle of the decade. Walker has been preparing like a Seal. In late October, NASA representatives began showing up. Everything was very realistic.
Sometime in the next few months, the first American moon missions in 50 years will return to Earth. At least not yet, the arrivals will not be government- built. Private spaceships carrying science experiments and other cargo will be part of the lunar fleet. The first voyage of the United Launch Alliance's new Vulcan Centaur rocket is expected to take place before the end of the year. By the end of this year, a competing lunar start-up will launch its lunar lander, Nova-C, on a SpaceXFalcon 9 rocket. A dozen more firms are expected to follow in the next six years, carrying cargo ranging from a magnetometer to small amounts of cremated human remains.
The commercial space economy is gradually ramping up. Private companies have been flying cargo to the International Space Station since 2012 as a result of the launch of the first rocket by the company. The long-awaited era of regular private space tourism began in 2021.
Going to the moon is not easy. The journey from Earth to the moon takes about three days, compared to a few minutes to reach Earth, due to the amount of fuel burned. The new moon race is being pioneered by small companies because none of the big companies have made it past the prototype phase.
The Artemis program aims to return humans to the moon by the year 2025. The Space Launch System, the agency's own moon rocket, has been under development since 2011. NASA pays private companies to take on some of the load in order to outsourcing these smaller, near-term missions. NASA believes a commercial lunar market will increase competition, drive down prices and ensure people will keep going back to the moon regardless of who is in the White House. The companies hope that their NASA-subsidized cargo deliveries will jump-start a new economic boom like the transcontinental railroad did in the 19th century. If rockets were to launch out into the solar system from a lunar base station, there would be a rush for moon metals, water and helium.
The science missions that have been in the works for a long time are poised to get to the moon. There is a spare copy of the instrument that was built for the different mission. This private-public moon rush should allow it to fly.
Scientists on the moon are watching the activity with mixed feelings. "This is the second or third time I've been told we're going back to the moon." I believe it is true this time. The launches have been paid for and are on the books.
The prospects for a gold rush on the moon are still speculative despite the fact that any private enterprise needs to make money. There is a market for lunar landers. It depends on who you ask, and on what the new fleet ofrobots is able to do.
Private moon missions are the next step in a process that began 17 years ago with the creation of the COTS program. NASA wanted to pay private companies to build ships that could fly to the space station after the shuttles are retired. NASA helped develop new rockets and cargo ships. The program led to the creation of new vehicles that can bring supplies to the space station. The company began flying humans to the station in 2020 after completing 156 launches of its Falcon 9 rockets.
In December of last year, the Trump administration announced a program to return to the moon. Zurbuchen saw an opportunity to increase NASA's science budget at the same time as Trump wanted to send astronauts there. He wanted to know what happened to the companies that competed in the XPRIZE.
The first privately financed moon landers would have been given $20 million by the XPRIZE Foundation. After a decade without a winner, the program ended because it was too expensive to get to the moon. SpaceIL, an Israeli start-up, made it to the moon but crashed in April. Several companies built prototypes of landers and rovers that could deliver all kinds of cargo to the moon, in some cases more cheaply than a traditional NASA mission. Smaller firms such as Micro- Space were included. Many of the companies continued to work on their products after the competition ended.
NASA created a high-risk, high-reward lunar payload services program in order to encourage a lunar marketplace to take off. Private companies are paid by NASA to build landers, rovers and other instruments and carry science experiments on them. There were more rockets that could make the trip to the moon this time, and Zurbuchen thought the odds were better than in 2007.
The CLPS got off the ground thanks togeopolitics. The $2.6 billion was secured by Zurbuchen because of Trump and American fears of China rising in space. After landing at the moon's south pole, the Chinese lander and rover collected samples that were returned to Earth. "We have every reason to believe that we have a very aggressive competitor in the Chinese, going back to the moon with taikonauts," said NASA administrator Bill Nelson. The position of NASA is that we want to be there first. Suddenly, lunar XPRIZE competitors such as Astrobotic were back in the game. A Chinese lunar mission and zero U.S. landers on contract were some of the things that happened last year. There are currently seven American lunar landers in place. A sea change is what it is.
One of the three classes is NASA. Flagship missions such as the Mars rovers take up the most money. The projects are run by teams of scientists and engineers from across the space agency. Smaller missions are capped at $850 million and fall into a new class. The cost of the Discovery missions is $450 million. Launching any of these missions requires years of planning and preparation, not every mission is chosen, and scientists may try for a good portion of their career before landing a Discovery mission.
The program is not the same as the one before it. A single commercial lander may carry a dozen different things. Faster scientific return for less money is what scientists who submit a simple science instrument for a CLPS mission can expect. Stickle says that you don't have to build a spaceship for 15 years.
A total of seven contracts have been awarded from four companies. The first two landers to be launched by Astrobotic are the Peregrine and Nova-C.
Chris Culbert, who manages the CLPS program at the NASA Johnson Space Center, said at a panel discussion in November that there had been 50 years of nothing going to the moon.
There will be more than experiments on the first private moon missions. The Mexican Space Agency is launching the first lunar instruments from Latin America and a Japanese company is sending a time capsule of messages from children around the world.
If the missions land safely, they will be able to answer some of the most pressing questions about the moon. Researchers are debating how our satellite came to be. The nature of moonquakes, weathering by the solar wind, and the extent and nature of lunar water are questioned. The moon's near side and far side are different, so scientists don't know why. We would be able to understand how people might live and work on the moon. Understanding how Earth and its companion formed, how the sun evolved, and whether a body like the moon is vital for the eventual origin of life is just some of the questions we can investigate.
Scientific instruments that were simple and cheap were the first to be awarded. In some cases, NASA looked for spare parts like SEAL that had been left over from other missions. Robert Grimm, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute, who is building multiple instruments to fly on different landers, was told by an agency official that they would send rocks back to the moon.
The first mission of Astrobotic will be in the fourth quarter of 2022. There is a dark plain on the western edge of the moon. The other is going to bring a drill that will be used to sample lunar ice from the south pole. Later missions will attempt more daring sites with more intriguing geological features and will bring instruments to study the moon's magnetic field and geology. A major science mission that will prospect for water at the south pole will be delivered by Astrobotic.
The mission for David Blewett was selected in June of 2021. A bright surface marking shaped like a tadpole will be investigated by his project. Scientists don't know how the swirl came to be. The moon has a magnetic field that is thought to have changed the motion of the surface dust. The swirl will be studied for 13 Earth days to determine its magnetic properties.
Under NASA's traditional mission-selection process, the moon would have been part of a $450-million spaceship. Instead it is flying for $30 million as an instrument on the landers. The hardware is less expensive and simpler than a typical planetary science mission. The mission's camera is being designed by a planetary scientist. The detectors are similar to cell-phone camera detectors.
There is an impact crater on the far side that has a peak ring that is a hallmark of large impacts. The first seismometer to land on the moon since Apollo will be part of the mission. Grimm says they will provide a better picture of the moon's interior heat and structure.
In the next six years, there will be other experiments that will look at how lunar regolith is affected by landings on the moon. They will investigate the radiation environment on the moon, study its carbon dioxide, methane and other volatile substances, search for water ice, and look for radio waves at the surface to inform plans for telescopes to be built on the moon in the future. If industry partners get their wish, these missions will answer key research questions, demonstrate new technologies, and prepare scientists and astronauts for eventual human arrivals on the moon.
Entrepreneurs and investors in the private space industry are not all motivated by scientific curiosity. They want to make money from the resources on the moon. The value of that lunar material isn't certain.
It is possible to find lunar water inside permanently shadowed craters. Oxygen and hydrogen could be separated from the water to be used for rocket fuel. If the moon eventually hosts an active launch pad, lunar water mining will be profitable. Even if there is a market for it, it will be hard to create the infrastructure to convert water to rocket fuel.
There is money to be made on the moon before it becomes a mining outpost. The managing partner of Space Capital, which invested in Astrobotic, says he would be very nervous if the whole story was true. According to Anderson, there has been $258 billion invested in space-related companies since the beginning of the year.
Anderson believes that this wave of experiments could lead to a profitable cycle in which the first instruments make promising finds, leading to more questions and eventually new interest from prospectors who want to locate and extract whatever the moon has to offer. The program stimulates a market and multiple companies in a market. You are going to start selling picks and shovels and overalls when people go out to look for gold because the economy builds around them. Communications capability and solar power are commodities that a landers can sell for a fee.
A graduate student at the London School of Economics who studies public policy has an interest in the commercial space industry. She believes that the government will allow some companies to develop their products, while others will need to fill in the gaps.
One of its early clients was Malaysia, as well as the Defense Department, according to Nguyen. The economics of space are studied by Matthew Weinzierl, a professor at Harvard Business School. He wants to know what the big upside is. Where will the big demand come from for visions of a marketplace on the moon? People in the industry wrestle with that kind of tension. People are hoping that things will work out. Weinzierl says that Earth is full of capital and that space can be used to store it.
Some lunar scientists are against private flights to the moon while others are in favor. Leading lunar researchers want more transparency and better planning. Stickle thinks there are some feelings.
Since Apollo, lunar exploration has relied on a sometimes awkward relationship between the jingoism and swagger inherent in human spaceflight and the more goal oriented, pragmatic approach of scientific exploration. Denevi says that lunar science gets caught up in larger issues that aren't driven by science. Those who are excited to get their experiments on the first private flights acknowledge that it could be a problem. The elephant in the room is the fact that many small CLPS missions may not allow for the kind of science that can be done best with a bigger mission.
Amy Fagan is the chair of the Lunar Exploration Analysis Group and a lunar scientist at Western Carolina University. Some lunar scientists are worried about hurting their chances for a NASA Discovery mission or just want to do more, so they are thinking a few steps ahead.
In the face of budget cuts or politics, the CLPS may be more resistant than larger and more expensive government projects. Some lunar scientists were surprised by the Biden administration's continued funding of CLPS contracts and the adoption of the Artemis program begun by Trump. There was an administration change and Artemis is still there. It is important to return to the moon.
The new missions will show the country's present version of government-subsidized capitalism, ultimately sharing the control and credit with entrepreneurs. Regardless of who launches the ships, scientists should get their answers. The moon will not be discriminated against.
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