NASA Issues NextSTEP ISRU Contracts to 10 Companies
NASA Selects US Companies to Advance Space Resource Collection
“NASA has selected 10 companies to conduct studies and advance technologies to collect, process and use space-based resources for missions to the Moon and Mars. NASA placed a special emphasis on encouraging the responders to find new applications for existing, terrestrial capabilities that could result in future space exploration capabilities at lower costs.”
The first track is for one-year studies to identify technology gaps associated with ISRU, and to further define the benefits of including it in space mission architectures. The organizations selected for Track 1 are:
– Blue Origin, Kent, Washington
– United Launch Alliance, Centennial, Colorado
– University of Illinois, Urbana, Illinois
– UTC Aerospace Systems, Windsor Locks, Connecticut
The second and third tracks address technology development and demonstration for as long as three and a half years. Component-level development and testing in simulated space environments is the focus for Track 2 selections, which are:
– BlazeTech Corporation, Woburn, Massachusetts
– Paragon Space Development Corporation, Tucson, Arizona
– Skyhaven Systems, Steamboat Springs, Colorado
– Teledyne Energy Systems, Hunt Valley, Maryland
The third track include extensive subsystem development and testing in simulated space environments Selections for this track are:
– Honeybee Robotics Spacecraft Mechanisms Corporation, Pasadena, California
– OxEon Energy LLC, Clearfield, Utah
Sounds like a shot-gun approach to get ideas and concepts similar to a white-paper request. Ultimately if human space goals do not change and coalesce towards the common goal of permanent and sustainable human settlement rather than “exploration” or “scientific study” then the rate of advancement will remain glacially slow and continue to suffer multi-year setbacks if not worse.
In other words you give everyone a shot and sees who delivers for the serious funding, a good market based approach. And this would actually allow the goal to be accomplished.
Not when the goal itself is very poorly defined and the support is only fleeting.
I guess the first two teams have me scratching my head.
They aren’t bad choices if you look at what they’ve been funded to do. It says, “…further define the benefits of including [ISRU]…” That’s not designing the hardware itself, it’s working out how you’d use the hardware and what you’d want it to do. That’s good input for a requirements document for some later contract to actually build hardware. And Blue Origins and ULA aren’t unreasonable choices to see work out how ISRU would be used.
I keep wondering how many of these companies have geologists on staff? Geologists who understand the difference between remote sensing and ground truth and the difficulties of making this distinction on any other body besides Earth.
Or someone who’s actually used a shovel? Based on quite a bit of field work involving seismic sounding, my father used to joke that PhD stood for “Post hole Digger.” Some of the plans for automated drilling (e.g. InSight or the Europa Lander concept) make me cringe. This is not the sort of work you can trivially or easily automate. So, yes, they really ought to have people with real, practical experience involved. But, no, I suspect they don’t.
Honeybee Robotics has been doing do good work for mars sensors and also for the mining industry.
https://www.honeybeerobotic…
OxEon has been doing solid oixide fuel cell development for .. forever ..
https://oxeonenergy.com/
Robotics, sensors and power.
The problem I note with Honeybee, and maybe others, is they seem to over sell what they have been doing regarding planetary stuff (i.e. “For 27 years, Honeybee Robotics has been advancing planetary exploration technology…”), and I don’t find a provable record of this work on their site. And I am not wholly impressed by the citations they do provide as their sales pitch – not that the work was not good or interesting; The latest one being 4 years ago and only going back to 2012. This opens more questions than answers for me.