In above moon lander, The vehicle, called Peregrine, was a four-legged, foil-wrapped canister as big as a hot tub. The instrument—Surface and Exosphere Alterations by Landers, or SEAL—was a shoebox-sized sensor designed to study how a spacecraft’s landing disturbs moon dust. Peregrine is scheduled to launch later this year—and it is just one of many missions that private companies are scrambling to send up after years of preparation. Since its founding in 2007 as a scrappy competitor for the now defunct Google Lunar. Astronomic had been working on its lander and signing deals with companies that wanted to put instruments on it, planning for a launch eventually. But in 2018 NASA came calling with a funding scheme that would turn Astronomic into one of several moon ferries by the middle of this decade. Since then, Walker has been readying payloads like SEAL. All of a sudden, in late October, started showing up.
Sometime in the next four or five months, the first American moon missions in half a century will make a return to Earth’s satellite. The arrivals won’t be human—at least not yet—and they won’t even be government-built. The coming lunar fleet will consist of private spacecraft carrying science experiments and other cargo for paying customers, including NASA. Astronomic Peregrine lander is due to ride on United Launch Alliance’s new Vulcan Centaur rocket, scheduled to make its inaugural voyage before the end of 2022. Competing lunar start-up Intuitive Machines is set to launch its lunar lander, Nova-C, on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, also by the end of this year. A dozen more firms are expected to follow in the next six years, carrying cargo that ranges from a magnetometer and supplies for a future lunar base camp to small amounts of cremated human remains.
These will be just the latest firsts in a gradual ramping up of the commercial space economy. SpaceX launched its first rocket in 2006, and since 2012 it and other private companies such as Northrop Grumman have been flying cargo to the International Space Station—and more lately, crew. In 2021 the long-delayed era of regular private space tourism arrived as billionaires and celebrity customers started riding rockets into near-Earth space.
But going to the moon is a much taller order. Rockets that can reach the moon must burn more fuel than normal launches to escape Earth’s orbit and enter a lunar trajectory, and the journey takes about three days, as opposed to a few minutes to reach Earth orbit. Although companies such as SpaceX have plans for crewed ships to the moon, none have made it past the prototype phase, so for now the new moon race is being pioneered by small companies such as Astronomic.
NASA has not gotten out of the spacecraft business; its Artemis program, a sister to the Apollo missions, aims to return humans to the lunar surface by 2025. The agency has been working on its own new moon rocket, the Space Launch System, since 2011, and scientists still plan new missions under its planetary exploration programs. But outsourcing these smaller, near-term missions to industry is part of NASA’s modern strategy of paying private companies to take on some load. NASA officials say a commercial lunar market will increase competition, drive down prices, and ensure people will keep going back to the moon regardless of who occupies the White House. For their part, the companies hope that their NASA-subsidized cargo deliveries will jump-start a new economic boom, the way the transcontinental railroad spurred Western development in 19th-century America. This time the rush would be for moon metals, water and helium—materials that could become precious if rockets were to start launching out into the solar system from a lunar base station.
Experiments won’t be the only cargo on the first private lunar missions. The astronomic manifest includes items from, among others, the Mexican Space Agency, which is launching the first lunar instruments from Latin America; a Japanese company called Autoscale, sending a time capsule of messages from children around the world; and two firms promising to fly cremated human remains to the lunar surface on behalf of family members who want a celestial send-off for their loved one.
But if the missions land safely, they will also pull off a lot of science, possibly answering some of the most urgent questions we still have about the moon. Researchers debate how exactly our satellite formed, and when. They question the nature of moon quakes, weathering by the solar wind, and the extent and nature of lunar water. Scientists don’t know for sure why the moon’s near side and far side appear so different. Solving these riddles about the moon would help us understand how people might live and work there someday. But even more broadly, investigating these questions will help us understand how Earth and its companion formed, how the sun evolved, and perhaps even whether a body like the moon is vital for the eventual origin of life.
The sustainability of any private enterprise depends on making money, and the prospects for a gold rush on the moon are still speculative. Is there really a lasting market for commercial lunar landers? That depends on who you ask—and on, Private moon missions are arguably the inevitable next step in a process that NASA set in motion 17 years ago, with the creation of the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program. COTS was NASA’s plan to pay private companies to develop ships that could fly to the space station after the retirement of the space shuttles. NASA spent $500 million over five years to help SpaceX and Orbital Sciences develop new rockets and cargo ships. The program was a success, leading to new reusable launchers and vehicles that reliably bring supplies to the space station. SpaceX has since completed 156 launches of Falcon 9 rockets, developed with NASA seed money, and in 2020 the company began flying human astronauts to the station.
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