Will Orbit Beyond's Indian Lander Be Built In Florida or India?
Bengaluru firm to build moon lander for Nasa 2020 mission, Times of India
“Confirming the development, Team Indus engineer Ananth Ramesh told TOI: “Yes, we will be building the lander. It is most likely to be built in India too.” Team Indus CEO Rahul Narayan was in the US to sign the contract documents on Thursday.”
America’s first private moon lander will be engineered in India, Quartz
“Orbit Beyond, which will assemble the lander and spacecraft in Florida, also includes US firms Honeybee Robotics, Advanced Space, Ceres Robotics, and Apollo Fusion to handle tasks including the installation of scientific payloads, maneuvering from the earth to the moon, and operations on the lunar surface.”
Keith’s 15 June note: If you read articles about OrbitBeyond in the Indian press they all say that the lander will likely be built in India. If you read stories published in the U.S. they say it will be assembled here. This issue apparently came up in last week’s space science hearings. OrbitBeyond is a privately held company that was only recently established and looks to be designed as more of a shell company to coordinate the activities of its various team members. The bulk of the hardware is going to be of Indian design. The lingering question is: where will it actually be built?
Keith’s 18 June note: OrbitBeyond has not replied to requests on this issue.
I suppose both could be correct… designed and manufactured in India and assembled in the US. The IKEA model 😉 Looks like Michael Kaplan is one of the principals of Orbit Beyond, and he posts here occasionally, maybe he’ll respond…
If he’s involved, I’d be surprised if he can say much about it. There are such things as proprietary information and non-disclosure agreements.
True, although even if he weren’t prohibited by contract I’d be surprised, but you never know.
Well, like all to many things nowadays, it looks like it will be manufactured overseas, and merely assembled in the United States.
isn’t the more important question “when will it be ready ?”
How long would it take to rebuilt an Apollo LEM ? Does it interface with a crewed Dragon ? or an Orion ?
The shortest path to crewed launch is Falcon Heavy … yes?
Then how about on-orbit assembly of the various pieces (Lander, Service module, Crewed Module) made by whoever (so long as they interface) and use Falcon Heavy (or Soyuz?) to launch the crew. Earth re-entry capsule (Crewed Dragon) could remain in earth orbit.
“by any means necessary” doesn’t mean footing the largest bill you can think of.
Just FYI, this contract isn’t for any crewed lander, it’s for a preliminary round of light cargo landers, to deliver science instruments to the Moon in the next couple years. Intuitive Machines and Astrobotic are the other two winners.
The full list of nine preliminary CLPS bidders is at http://www.parabolicarc.com…
Interestingly, a number of outfits with considerably more experience in various aspects of the job weren’t selected.
Masten, Lockheed-Martin/Littleton, and Draper Labs to name a few. Is NASA once again prioritizing something other than odds of success here? We’ll see.
Cost is probably something they would consider. Schedule flexibility in operations would probably be another. (Note, I wrote “operations”, the development and testing schedule, all the way to the first landing, is probably mandated.)
Probably better to build it in India since they have experience in building lunar landers. The U.S. hasn’t built one in almost 50 years.
Years ago when COTS was announced and also plan for NASA to have CEV instead of Shuttle, we’re still waiting for Orion but SpaceX and others have been delivering cargo to ISS. Fast forward to this year we have commercial lunar landers announced and NASA will have boots on the ground. I see years from now still waiting to put a person on the moon but there will be commercial landers delivering science payloads to the moon. Like the LEO providers, those companies are behind schedule from their first estimates but at least there is real hardware that docked with the ISS.
Maybe some companies have business interests in the moon (I’ve not surfed all the websites, probably some serious plans are not on the internet), so far it seems only customer(s) are NASA. So as Space1999 suggests that this Indian lander will set the IKEA paradigm.
Keith,
Not sure how to get this to you and I hope its OK to post it here, but there is a JFK Space Summit tomorrow, June 19 at the JFK Library. I just got the email on it. It features Jeff Bezos, Charles Bolden and Michael Collins among others. The live stream starts at 9:00 am EDT. Here is the link.
https://www.jfklibrary.org/…
I am surprised there wasn’t more PR on this given the list of speakers.
I think the nasawatch email link in the banner is potentially best for making quickest contact.