Checking In on Commercial Moon Plans
NASA Seeks Information on Commercial Robotic Lunar Lander Capabilities
“NASA Tuesday issued a Request for Information (RFI) that will help agency officials better understand current plans in the U.S. commercial space industry for a robotic lunar landing capability. The RFI will assist NASA in assessing U.S. industry’s interest in partnerships to develop a robotic lander that could enable commercial and agency missions.
NASA does not envision an exchange of funds between the agency and any industry partners. Potential NASA contributions to a partnership could include the technical expertise of NASA staff on integrated teams, providing NASA center test facilities at no cost, or contributing hardware or software for commercial lander development and testing.”
Related:
– NASA RFI on Potential Partnerships for Industry-Led Development of Robotic Lunar Landers
– Space Development: Going Everywhere and Nowhere
Marc’s note: No doubt commercial entities will be intrigued to have access to NASA expertise etc. but at what cost? They have to think about their business plan, intellectual property (IP) etc. What does NASA get out of it? There’s no exchange of funds and there’s definitely an IP issue to consider. How will Congress react? Is this a possible model for private/public commercial exploration of the moon?
“U.S. industry is flourishing with innovative ideas based on NASA’s pioneering work to explore space, including low-Earth orbit and the moon,” said William Gerstenmaier, NASA’s associate administrator for human exploration and operations in Washington.” As NASA aims to expand human presence in the solar system through missions to an asteroid and Mars, hundreds of new technologies and experiments aboard the International Space Station are giving humans the tools we need to explore the unknown. New robotic commercial capabilities on the moon could extend that research in important ways, just as NASA expertise could help advance commercial endeavors to reach the moon.“
The Small class lunar lander payloads range from 30 to 100 kg. Hopefully these can be launched directly to lunar orbit by the smaller launch vehicles, ones that normally only go to LEO.
The medium class lunar lander payloads range from 250 to 450 kg. This is very similar to the 500 kg payload of the Project Morpheus lander. Possibly why that project now calls its current lander an ascent stage.
I hope this RFI means that NASA is dreaming about sending probes, rovers and ISRU (In-situ Resource Utilisation) equipment to the Moon. Now to get Congress to agree.
I agree. This feels like a good start in the right direction.
On a somewhat related note, Planetary Resource’s Kickstarter successfully raised $1.5 million from 17,600 backers over 33 days. (I don’t think I’ve ever had an SBIR proposal reviewed that quickly)
I wonder if the next Lunar lander/rover will be crowd funded?
http://www.planetaryresourc…
We did post this:
http://spaceref.com/news/vi…
I do not know of anyone that plans to send robotic landers to the Moon. They plan to send people. Sorry NASA. Maybe someone will now come forward. No money for NASA to pay for it,so I doubt it.
Teams are already doing this in competition for the Google X-prize. Better would be an RFI for small manned lunar landers. This could result in drastically reduced mission size. For example the Altair lunar lander for Constellation was three times the size of the Apollo lander. But after 40 years since Apollo, we can make a lander smaller, not larger than the Apollo one.
Bob Clark