Who will carry the cargo on the moon? NASA will announce contracts today

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NASA will land on the moon again, maybe as early as next year.

The agency will not send people, however. It will still take at least five years before astronauts find themselves on the moon.

But Friday, NASA will announce the first contracts to send small experiments and technological packages on board space robots.

Although not as exciting as a human mission, these landers would be the first American spacecraft to land on the moon since the departure of the Apollo 17 astronauts in 1972.

In November, NASA announced that it had selected nine competing companies to bring up to $ 2.6 billion over the next ten years to bring payloads to the moon, in part of a program called Commercial Lunar Payload Services. These could be small experiments such as retroreflectors – essentially fancy mirrors reflecting light in the direction they come from – that would accurately measure the gravity of the moon.

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These spacecraft would be small, far too small for astronauts, or even carry supplies to the surface. (They will likely be the same size as Beresheet, the lunar lander built by an Israeli nonprofit organization that attempted to land earlier this year but crashed.)

However, these spacecraft could explore potential landing sites for human missions. Future astronaut missions must land near the lunar south pole, where ice is frozen in the eternal shadows of some craters.

Ice would not only be a source of water, but could also be broken down into hydrogen and oxygen. Both could provide rocket engine thrusters, and oxygen would also provide air for astronauts to breathe.

No one knows how difficult it will be to extract useful materials from ice. it could be mixed with earth and rocks.

Missions could also deliver prototypes of future telescopes and other scientific instruments.

The companies, made up of NASA's established subcontractors and young space companies, were:

  • Pittsburgh Astrobotics Technology;

  • Deep Space Systems of Littleton, Colorado;

  • Draper of Cambridge, Mass .;

  • Firefly Aerospace of Cedar Park, Tex .;

  • Intuitive machines from Houston;

  • Lockheed Martin of Littleton, Colorado;

  • Masten Space Systems of Mojave, California;

  • Moon Express of Cape Canaveral, Florida;

  • Orbit Beyond of Edison, N.J.

Unlike the programs of the past moon, designed and operated by NASA, the space agency wants to take a low-cost, high-risk approach.

Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA's Deputy Administrator of Science, uses an analogy to hockey: NASA wants to take many strikes to the goal, without expecting them to score all.

Some, perhaps most, of these businesses are likely to fail. But the hope is that the effort will revive a new industry, essentially that of FedEx or the U.P.S. on the Moon, just like SpaceX's mission was to transport supplies cheaply to the International Space Station and to be able to use the same rocket for launching commercial satellites.

In the long term, successful companies could offer services not only to NASA, but at companies that also want to settle on the moon.

It is unclear to what extent these companies are competent and how the Moon is a goalkeeper who blocks space vehicles.

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