[ad_1]
NASA has announced that Astrobotic, Intuitive Machines and OrbitBeyond have won contracts for the supply of scientific instruments and technology demonstration charges on the moon's surface during the first of a series of robotic missions preceding a human return on the moon.
The three companies are developing commercial lunar earth stations capable of carrying experiments, sensors and small rovers on the Moon. Astrobotic, Intuitive Machines and OrbitBeyond are among the nine companies selected by NASA last November to compete in the Space Agency's Commercial Lunar Payload Services program to bring scientific instruments to the lunar surface.
NASA officials on Friday announced contract announcements with the SPLC as a springboard for astronauts landing on the moon by 2024, a target set by the Trump administration in March, which extended the four-year shots of the human landing. NASA has named the accelerated lunar landing program Artemis, goddess of the moon and sister of Apollo in Greek mythology.
"These PFPS providers are really paving the way for our return to the moon as part of the Artemis program. These are precursor missions before we land the first woman and the next man on the surface of the moon in 2024, "said Steve Clarke, associate associate administrator for exploration in NASA's science division. .
Astrobotic, Intuitive Machines and OrbitBeyond will share more than $ 250 million in contracts to deliver up to 23 NASA-backed payloads. NASA plans to award scientific and technological demonstration instruments to the LG of each company in the coming months.
The two companies will aim to become the first private entities to have managed to land on the moon, and the first to achieve this feat will mark the first landing of an American lander on the moon since the takeoff of the Apollo 17 mission. from the lunar surface in December. 1972.
OrbitBeyond says that he can reach the moon the next year
OrbitBeyond is a new name in the commercial lunar landers market, but the New Jersey-based company is leading a consortium of subcontractors who have designed and developed equipment for missions in the United States. deep space. Team Indus, an Indian company, heads Orbit Beyond's landing gear engineering. The payload integration tasks will be handled by Honeybee Robotics, who has built the hardware for several Mars NASA landers.
According to OrbitBeyond, the company's Z-01 lunar lander will be ready to land on the moon in September 2020. The company's contract with NASA is valued at $ 97 million and OrbitBeyond will carry up to four NASA payloads in the area of Mare Imbrium, on the moon, a lava plain on the lunar face.
The OrbitBeyond Lander is based on a design developed by TeamIndus, an Indian team that has already competed for the Google Lunar X award. TeamIndus is not eligible to compete for CLPS contracts, which are open to US companies.
While reusing the design of the Indian team, OrbitBeyond, based in New Jersey, plans to build its lunar landing gear in Florida. The Z-01 landing gear can carry around 40 kilos of payloads to the moon's surface.
Siba Padhi, president and chief executive officer of OrbitBeyond, said NASA's CLPS program would encourage additional private investment in lunar transport.
"We are very excited and hope to become a major player in the cis-lunar space.We look forward to assisting NASA in its mission to the moon (in 2024)," Padhi said at the time. a teleconference with journalists on Friday.
OrbitBeyond plans to launch the rover on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
"The launcher is on our critical track, because we want to enter the manifesto, which will be very busy over the next few years. So we will collaborate with SpaceX, "said Jon Morse, OrbitBeyond's Chief Scientist.
In addition to a range of commercial and commercial NASA payloads, the OrbitBeyond Lander will also carry a small rover for a lunar surface test.
"When we land, the rover goes down and goes away. He has a stereoscopic camera, "said Morse. "It's for us, as a company and with our partners, that we are learning how to do surface mobility and operations."
According to Padhi, OrbitBeyond is still getting full funding for the development of the Z-01 Lander. The company already has a spacecraft engineering model and made advance payments for the flight equipment, Padhi said.
OrbitBeyond counts Ceres Robotics and Honeybee Robotics as key partners in its commercial lunar landing program.
The Astrobotic lander Peregrine will head to the Moon in 2021
In the case of Astrobotic, Dynetics and Airbus Defense and Space support the development of the Peregrine Lander, a robotic machine 1.9 meters (1.9 meters) high and 2.5 meters wide (8.2 feet).
The contract signed by NASA with Astrobotic for the delivery of 14 scientific loads of the agency on the Moon is $ 79.5 million. Astrobotic, headquartered in Pittsburgh, plans to reach its first Peregrine mission by July 2021 at Lacus Mortis, a large crater surrounded by a surrounding lava plain.
The Peregrine is the first of a family of landing gear planned by Astrobotic. Like OrbitBeyond, Astrobotic has already competed for the late Google Lunar X Prize, which ended last year without a winner.
"As a nation, we have not landed on the moon's surface for 46 years, so we have to go back," said John Thornton, CEO of Astrobotic. "We have to start small, then go bigger and bigger."
Thornton said that Astrobotic had completed a preliminary design review of Peregrine last year. The company will build a structural test model and complete critical design review of the Peregrine LG later this year, milestones that will close the spacecraft design phase and mark the start of large scale production. view of its launch in June 2021.
"We are now fully funded for the mission (and) ready to be launched," Thornton said. "We still have a handful of kilograms for the payload customers … We are going to close the manifesto completely, very soon, but overall, we are on the way and ready for a July 21 landing."
Previously, Astrobotic had booked 14 payloads from eight countries for Peregrine's first landing, a list of micro-rovers designed to travel short distances to the moon. NASA's contract with Astrobotic doubled the mission payload manifest to 28 instruments.
Sharad Bhaskaran, Mission Director at Astrobotic, said the LG Peregrine will weigh about 1,400 kilograms (3,100 pounds), full of fuel for launch. The spacecraft will be able to carry up to 200 pounds (90 kilograms) of useful mass to the moon.
Astrobotic had previously announced that the first Peregrine mission would be a secondary payload in the United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket, but Thornton announced Friday that the company would make a final selection of launchers in a few weeks.
"We are going to ride as a secondary (payload)," Thornton said. "We have been working in partnership with ULA for a number of years and have close relationships with them. We also had a relationship with SpaceX. We are going to announce our launch literally in the coming weeks, so we are on schedule to arrive at our landing date, and we are not too worried about it. "
Intuitive machines builds on landing technology developed by NASA
Intuitive Machines has the biggest landing gear of the three companies that won NASA's payload delivery contracts last week.
From a height of about 3 meters (3 meters), the Nova-C Lander can send up to 220 pounds (100 kg) of scientific and technological demonstration payloads on the Moon . Houston-based Intuitive Machines reports that the Nova-C lander can reach any part of the moon and that, like Astrobotic's Peregrine spacecraft, it will be ready for its first lunar landing by July 2021.
"It's a dynamic program by design, so the two-year schedule is aggressive in every case," said Steve Altemus, President and CEO of Intuitive machinery.
Intuitive Machines was founded in 2013 by Kam Ghaffarian, an aerospace industry entrepreneur, with Altemus and Tim Crain, both former NASA engineers.
NASA's $ 77 million payload contract with Intuitive Machines covers the launch and landing of up to five instruments at Oceanus Procellarum, or the Ocean of Storms, a vast plain. lava located near the moon.
While the landing gear developed by OrbitBeyond and Astrobotic will use hydrazine, a liquid that can be stored in space at room temperature, Intuitive Machines plans to use a landing engine powered by liquid methane and oxygen. very cold. The use of cryogenic propellants adds to the complexity, particularly to prevent liquids from heating up in the sunlight, but the engine offers higher performance and could be a building block for larger landers, said Altemus.
The engine of the Nova-C undercarriage can be throttled to control its descent, said Crain, and the craft also embeds technology to avoid hazards such as craters, rocks and steep slopes.
"We have taken known risks on our side for a cryogenic propulsion system … because of its scalability, and we are competent in this area," said Altemus. "So we have problems with the management of cryogenic fluids for the development of the lunar lander, but we think we have them well in hand."
"I am proud to say that we are currently launching our LOX / Methane flight engine with flight software on a flight processor," Altemus said. "We had shooting tests last week and next week, and throughout the summer, we will do it to improve the performance of propulsion systems and software."
According to Altemus, Intuitive Machines has a "fully designed lander" and is "fully funded" to allow a landing on the moon in July 2021.
The Nova-C is largely responsible for the design of the Morpheus project, a technology demonstration project led by NASA's Johnson Space Center engineers, which tested a methane-powered descent engine, hazard detection sensors and other lunar landing equipment during a series of tests at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida from 2012 to 2014.
Intuitive Machines is planning to launch the Nova-C lander as the main payload for a multi-mission launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, Altemus said.
NASA officials said the agency plans to issue more orders to the nine SPDP providers over the next few years, and could eventually add more companies to the list of subcontractors eligible for competition for lunar payload delivery services.
"We hope to be able to build a cadence of two missions a year, and then perhaps within the deadlines of 23 or 24 (bringing this pace to three or four missions a year, traveling to several places the surface on the moon," said Clarke.
An essential capability that NASA requires commercial companies to develop and demonstrate is surface mobility. NASA has asked the nine CLPS vendors to submit engineering contract proposals outlining their plans to develop rovers, which could be used as scouts near the lunar south pole, where the Trump administration asked NASA to to land astronauts by 2024.
"This is the beginning of building a robust cadence of missions returning to the moon. We will do scientific research, we will demonstrate technology, we will do ISRU (use of in situ resources). An important thing about this is that a lot of what we do, we will move forward for human exploration on the surface of the moon. Much of what we do for precursor missions before 2024 will help us to inform. "
But the commercial program of lunar landers is risky. None of the three winners of the CLPS contract has ever launched a space mission, but their lunar lander projects include partnerships with major aerospace companies.
SpaceIL, an Israeli non-profit organization that developed the Beresheet lander, was the first private entity to attempt a lunar landing. It crushed on the moon during an attempt to land in April. The Israeli team is in the early stages of planning a follow-up mission called Beresheet 2.
"I am confident that these three companies will succeed," Clarke said. "As for all that is difficult – space travel is difficult – I have no doubt that technical challenges will arise over the next two years, but we have to wait for it … I do not doubt not that we will succeed landings on the moon in the next two years. "
NASA's director Jim Bridenstine has compared the CLPS program to "take shots on goal," a sporting analogy in which every shot should not fall into the goal.
Clarke said that he thought the commercial industry was mature enough to make the CLPS program a success, but added that "time will tell if this model works"
NASA has received eight proposals from the SPDP provider list. The agency opted for Astrobotic, Intuitive Machines and OrbitBeyond.
"I have great confidence in these three companies, because we ordered and received proposals. These three companies showed what I would call credible, well-thought-out technical plans, with a schedule and costs tailored to their plans and they identified risks along the way, "Clarke said.
Email of the author.
Follow Stephen Clark on Twitter: @ StephenClark1.
[ad_2]
Source link