Moon Express Does A Big Reveal
Moon Express Unveils Lunar Mission Architecture, Moon Express
“On July 12, 2017, Moon Express unveiled its exploration architecture, including plans to establish the world’s first permanent lunar outpost at the South Pole of the Moon by 2020. The company’s robotic explorers are flexible, scalable platforms that will help reopen the American frontier on the Moon, conduct prospecting and sample return operations, and support lunar science, exploration and commerce.”
Just add money 🙂
Or maybe, just add customers.
If you build it, keep your fingers crossed that they (customers) will come.
Hopefully they will. But customers won’t appear by magic, you need search for them. The weak part of most lunar ventures is their marketing plan. Often it doesn’t even exist.
But I know from working on an earlier lunar business plan there is a solid market that will generate revenue. But you need to work on reaching it almost as hard as you work on the technical aspects.
It sounds like they have money for at least one mission. If they pull it off, then it might be worth investing in them . . . assuming the business model makes sense.
Going to the moon to pick up some “dirt” and return it is not a business model, especially if it is a one-off feat. We still have lots of unstudied “rocks and dirt” from the Apollo program. For something to be a business, they need a product and a customer base. They should just say it is a technology demonstration or fun thing to do and leave it at that.
That’s why I qualified it. There may not be a market for new moon rocks, unless they’re doing the landings in some unusual places that the Apollo missions didn’t visit (or unless their rover accidentally lands on top of the remnants of a metallic asteroid impact that was unusually rich in Platinum Group Metals).
Still, actually pulling off a demonstration mission would put them head and shoulders over most of their other Space Startup contemporaries. We’ve got tons of startup companies with paper rockets and dubious profit models, that’ll never go anywhere because they don’t even have enough capital to start.
I read somewhere that access to moon dirt of your own is actually quite expensive. Trouble is that value is based on rarity. I don’t think they will stay that way for long now. Maybe just long enough to push to the next thing after that. Unobtainium? 😉
At least scientifically, I don’t see it. Returning samples from some, geologically different region (and there are plenty which Apollo didn’t touch) might be nice. But the main lesson from the Soviet, unmanned sample returns was that the good samples are not going to be within arms reach of the lander. Even if you land at a new and different site, a “grab what’s next to lander” approach isn’t likely to yield scientifically valuable samples.
Actually that is good, since they are not scientifically valuable it means there will be no opposition to selling them. Remember, this is a commercial flight, not a government one. 🙂
It doesn’t have to be an accident. I’m sure that sort of thing on the “dark-side” could be detected using spectograghy from orbit. The facing side that we can see from Earth is covered mostly with fairly new lava fields, so it’s probably more difficult to find stuff like that there but smart, enterprising folks could probably try to do that from their backyard.
I don’t see NASA not using a spectrograph on their orbiters. Check the data. They did a gravity study with another pair of spacecraft recently, that could maybe point to denser material on the planet and show folks where to point a spectrograph.
I wonder what Dennis Wingo and Paul Spudis have to say about this.
On Twitter, 19 hours ago, Dennis Wingo replied to an Ars Technica article about this news saying, “I have to say that I am skeptical at this point…”
Paul Spudis is our chief scientist.
Moon Express has three big investors and has flown stuff at KSC. Probably if anyone has the muscle to do this, it is them.
When NASA sent Clementine to the moon it cost $300M, and it did not land softly. I am sure a private operation can do it for less money. but 15 times less?
Clementine was a Department of Defense mission, and it didn’t land at all. It did both enter and leave lunar orbit, and would have also gone to a near Earth asteroid. (Except for the miscommand or computer glitch and that 80 rpm spin business…)
I’m not sure the mission profile is comparable to this private venture. The Chinese Chang’e 3 seems to be a much closer comparison. But getting accurate cost information on a Chinese space mission is basically a lost cause.
Paul Spudis wrote about the Clementine was a spin-off of “brilliant pebbles” satellite which design was repurposed. Interesting situation how it came about (it’s in Spudis book but been some time since I read it and there were all kinds of “variables”). Results it suggested water on the Moon and other results that helped defined Lunar Recon Orbiter and LCROSS. LRO has produced very good surface images and LCROSS showed there’s water on the Moon. Now if private business can get to a point where they can do prospecting… think what can happen if they find a asteroid impact with lots of platinum grade metals. Of course finding a PGM asteroid itself but the lunar surface is more stable and within 250K miles unlike chasing a hard-to-find rock zooming around the solar system.
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What can they do? Nothing.
Unless, of course, these materials can be used in situ, surely the costs associated with this type of mining would far outweigh the sales of materials finally landed on Earth.
The future of space is in *finished goods* made from available materials and used in space. And that is many decades in the future.
Platinum group metals. Wonderful. Some of them could be worth importing from the Moon or an asteroid. Rhodium, which I think is the most expensive, sells for about $2000 per ounce ($65 per gram, or $65 _million_ per tonne.) Of course, you’d glut the market if you sold more than a few tonnes of the stuff.
If you could land, reach out a mechanical arm, and shovel rhodium into a return capsule, you might be able to turn a profit. However, that isn’t likely. According to Wikipedia, “Typical ores for PGMs contain ca. 10 g PGM/ton ore.” Of course, a metal-rich asteroid could have ore with a higher concentration. But even at a hundred times the concentration, and assuming it was all rhodium (and not a less valuable platinum group metal), that’s just $65,000 per tonne of ore. It would take a massive mining and refining operation to turn that into something worth importing to Earth.
And before anyone gets too excited by the idea of finding a PGM-rich asteroid impact site on the Moon, look up the history of Barringer crater. Mr. Barringer bought it, because he thought it was an impact crater, and that there should be rich metal deposits in it. He was right about it being crater from a metal-rich impactor. But the impact scattered that metal all over the American Southwest, in the form of Canyon Diablo meteorites.
Lunar Prospector was done for $60M, and it did not land on the moon, just a simple orbiter.
Pretty gutsy if you ask me. Easy to talk about Mars missions as those are 20 years away (though recent admissions not enough money to do those). However, talking about the Moon now means Moon Express has got to deliver hardware now, and make it work in three years. Yeesh, if they fail to deliver… but like a startup in Silicon Valley that goes bellyup gives others to learn from to not make the same mistakes.
Actually, others pick through the bones looking for useful things to run with.
Some are still trying to claim that the Silicon Valley analog doesn’t apply to space…I think those folks are food for the train wheels. 😉
The 5 and 9 look a little bit like they have upside-down R2 units hanging off of them. 😉
I’ve been saying we should do that for years. Why not include the ability to repair spacecraft in flight, rather than make sure nothing every breaks? Not to take the joke too far, but I’m not even sure if technology hasn’t overtaken science fiction. If we actually wanted a service/repair robot comparable to an R2 from the original Star Wars movie, how far beyond the state of the art would it be?
I want to be enthused by these designs, but two things come to mind: First: other than scientific payloads, the value of which is self-evident, are there other possible customers? If so, who? Or what? Or is this a baseball diamond in a cornfield?
Second: 2020? Really? 30-odd months away for Expedition One?
I guess no one likes my idea for micro-rover races as a college sports event, tapping into donations from rich alumni. Other than that, and the novelty jewelry market for moon rocks, I’m not seeing much in the way of cash customers. On larger scales, things like in space resources might be relevant. But that isn’t something a small payload provider could tap into.
I’m afraid I don’t follow your comment about the 2020 schedule. It sounds ambitious but not insanely so. The Expedition One goals, scope and timeline are so different that I don’t quite see your point.
My reaction was fueled at least in part by my own ignorance of what this company can actually do. The video on the website is very short of details: what is the booster? Is the flight path a sort of ‘moon direct’, or is there an earth orbit or a lunar orbit? Probably all private information, but then again, 30 months±?
(And the “eighth continent” idea is inspired).
Michael, You hit the nail on the head. It is a deep dark secret about what they can accomplish. The only evidence of any work so far is a single, partially successful Electron launch and the 2-year old rover test. Otherwise, nice videos, PR and fund-raising. And a nice R2-D2 model, too.
The problem is that even though this is private company, their hype provides the inertia for wasting taxpayer money on premature development of things like the Spaceports they may someday need. If a business model can be found. Exactly how much have they contributed to KSC? It was cool to use the Shuttle runway as the site for a tethered test that could have been conducted in any parking lot. This strategically encourages the sense that they have authority and a real program not otherwise in evidence.
I believe we hear the most from these companies when they are schmoozing the investors, or are in search of new funding. Take a look at Firefly. $19 million in new funding hyped 6 months before they lay off everyone. As long as it is private money, that’s their business. But elected officials are sucked into the hype faster than anyone.
Steve, some more data:
There are not many places in the U.S. where private companies can legally conduct rocket engine and vehicle flight testing. KSC had the existing infrastructure and procedures for hazardous operations, and the positive experience led to our decision to relocate the company to Florida from California in 2015.
In 2016 we reached an agreement with the USAF to license Space Launch Complexes 17 & 18 at Cape Canaveral. These were abandoned government launch sites (LC-17 was most recently the Delta II launch site, last used in 2011). We are investing into the refurbishment of these historic facilities, creating new jobs, and working hard to contribute to the new vibrancy of the Florida space coast along with other commercial space companies.
So Moon Express must have been testing a lot of systems in complete secrecy. Let’s just assume that somehow Rocket Lab has the “right stuff” to get the ME vehicle to the vicinity of the moon. Their Lander lands upright where intended and the Rover roves on the moon, sending 16 minutes of video back and re-transmitting the Google security code. They win the Lunar XPrize.
For their next phase, they have the problems, among many, of sample recovery, return vehicle, return launch, return guidance, reentry, recovery, and the business model. Can they really get all that right by 2020? 2025?
The XPrize success will likely hasten their demise because their professed business model depends on initial scarcity of the moon dust commodity, their future ability to find valuable materials where they can be mined, and the limitations of their launch system capacity. How many launches can they afford before they find enough platinum to justify the sunken costs?
This is the crazy thing about all of these great ideas. They are mind-blowing ideas and exciting like Heinlein, and there are plenty of people with money who can get behind a company like ME (at least for a while), but “Where’s the Beef?” Eventually they have to develop a profit model that makes sense. Without the business model, they are nothing more than a privately-funded, grand college research project.
By the way, how do they expect to get the MX-9 off Earth?
Steve, some clarifications:
– Electron is a relatively small launcher that can only deliver payloads to low earth orbit, it cannot get our spacecraft “to the vicinity of the moon”. The spacecraft needs to produce the delta-v required between LEO and the Moon.
– We have never expressed a dependency on the GLXP. Although we applaud the prize and would love to win it, the company was not formed to win a prize and it is not a driver … our maiden flight has several customers in the manifest.
– Our early business model is simply transportation of payloads and mission services beyond Earth orbit, which we see as an emergent profitable market.
– The various MX spacecraft configurations are designed to be compatible with existing and emergent launch vehicles. e.g. the MX-9 has a 4m deck that can fit in the shroud of a Falcon 9.