The OrbitBeyond Moon Mission Is Not Happening
Keith’s 29 July note:
This was tweeted by Thomas Zurbuchen @Dr_ThomasZ earlier today “NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) missions will be challenging for various reasons & they may not always succeed. We’re willing to accept some risk in order to get back to the Moon quickly with commercial partners, and do exciting science and tech development. While the first three companies selected to carry payloads to the Moon were announced in May, one of them, Orbit Beyond, Inc., has informed NASA that they will not be able to timely complete the awarded task order. As a result, NASA made a decision to comply with Orbit Beyond Inc’s request and terminated the task order on terms agreeable to both parties. Orbit Beyond, Inc. remains a CLPS contract awardee and may be eligible to compete for future opportunities.”
According to sources Team Indus was not willing to give OrbitBeyond the license needed to build this lander in the U.S. and the whole thing reached a halt this week with NASA realizing it was just not going to work. This is unfortunate for OrbitBeyond and the group of space companies it had assembled for this project. Hopefully they’ll be able to move ahead with other projects.
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 29 July note: OrbitBeyond has not replied to multiple requests on this issue sent more than a month ago. Various sources point to mounting management problems within OrbitBeyond. In a nutshell NASA picked Team Indus, an Indian company that was trying to win he Google Lunar X Prize to build this mission and they were calling all the shots.
Color me un-surprised, especially after NASA’s CFO made his remark about partnering with SpaceX if Starship pulls does a lunar landing.
CLPS is about landing small, robotic spacecraft as soon as possible. Both as precursors for human landings and for science. The landers for human spaceflight are a separate issue. I’m inclined to take Dr. Zurbuchen at his word. They selected several providers, so one could fail to meet deadlines without causing the whole program to fall off track.
Last week the Gateway habitat “competition” was blown up by NASA because of their accelerating schedule and the Cygnus proposal has flight history & proven propulsion.
IMO, CLPS and the 3-part human lander competition get blown up soon after Starship and/or Blue Moon (which has a crew upgrade path) touch down. Whoever hasn’t flown – POOF!
Has nothing to do with Starship, this is small landers, SpaceX doesn’t compete in this arena (they do provide launch services though, SpaceX would want these companies to be successful so that they can sell more launches. OrbitBeyond has reservation on Falcon 9, so this cancellation is a bummer for SpaceX too).
This has more to do with the fact that CLPS requires the company to spend the money in the US (which is entirely reasonable given this is taxpayer’s money), if Team Indus insists on building the lander at India, that just won’t work under the terms of the contract.
Curious. On the generality of a shell company coordinating the for-hire work of smaller team member companies it should have worked, but there was some “licensing” issue? It would be curious to understand what seems to be some obscure but significant little legality and where it all came apart, for future reference.
It is a bit odd… I’m guessing the plan all along was to have Team Indus build it in India, but when all the stories came out about NASA’s first commercial moon lander being Indian, the administration was unhappy. Possibly this was conveyed to NASA and then to Orbit Beyond in turn, who then tried to get Team Indus to license it for construction in the US. Team Indus wouldn’t budge, and here we are. Anyway that’s all wild conjecture, but it would seem politics came into play…
They cited financial reasons and it looks like an effort to attract investors, earlier this year didn’t pan out. Isn’t CLPS one of the contracts where the company is required to put in a significant amount of their own money? Of course the whole image of being Indian-built while pretending to be American probably drove some investors away.
I wonder if Masten will get a second crack at an award now? Can’t speak to the overall selection criteria, but certainly nobody else out there has more actual experience flying landers.