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The first American lunar lander of the 21st century will be designed in India, a result of NASA's new desire to outsource the production of its space vehicles.
NASA has announced that it will spend more than $ 250 million to hire private companies to transport science missions to the moon. These private missions, part of the US Space Agency's vast return campaign to the Moon, are designed to collect lunar surface data and pilot technologies for robotic explorers.
Three companies – Astrobotic, Intuitive Machines and Orbit Beyond – were awarded mission contracts up to 2021. Orbit Beyond is set as the deadline for its mission in September 2020.
Orbit Beyond is unique among the nine other NASA Commercial Lunar Payload Payload Services (CLPS) participants in that it is a consortium. The design and construction of his lander will be done by TeamIndus, an Indian company. (The Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) plans to launch its first lunar lander, Chandrayaan-2, in July 2019.)
TeamIndus was created in 2010 to participate in Google Lunar XPrize, a $ 30 million worth contest that could be won by sending a robot to the moon. The contest was canceled when it became clear that none of the participants would respect its deadline. But many did not give up; Israel's SpaceIL attempted to land on the moon this year and failed, while other former competitors like Astrobotic or iSpace in Japan plan to continue their missions.
International collaboration is common in space engineering: 15 countries, including the United States, Russia, Canada and Japan, have built the International Space Station; the European Space Agency is building an essential module for Orion, a spacecraft built by NASA; and NASA and ISRO are collaborating on a new radar satellite. Even the SPDP program will use scientific instruments from seven different countries on the Moon.
Yet NASA has never used a foreign-built lander before. Although the US Space Agency frequently delegates exploration missions to outside groups such as Lockheed Martin or Caltech's reaction propulsion laboratory, it remains deeply involved in the details of the design. This time, the US space agency subcontracts the design and operation of a space vehicle that will land on another astronomical body.
"When I say we buy a ride, that's literally what we do," said Steve Clark, who heads NASA's exploration programs on May 31. "They are responsible for the launch, the landing gear itself, we can use our instruments on the surface of the moon, we will not send fifteen engineers a year to monitor three people in the company."
The Orbit Beyond consortium also includes US companies Honeybee Robotics, Advanced Space, Ceres Robotics and Apollo Fusion, which include the installation of scientific workloads, ground-to-moon maneuvers, and satellite operations. lunar surface.
The failure of SpaceIL's Beresheet lander last April highlights the difficulty of landing a soft landing on the moon. Clark said he was confident in the teams chosen by NASA, and the company's leaders said they carefully weighed the risks of lunar transportation.
"There are no nine teams capable of lunar landing in the United States," said Steve Altimus, CEO of Intuitive Machines, May 31, inadvertently highlighting Orbit Beyond's international approach. "The manpower and skill mix of our teams is very important to build the right talent and the right lander."
Reaching the moon successfully, said in Quartz in 2016, the founder of TeamIndus, Rahul Narayan, "said that India could compete at the best technological level."
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