Until last year, the US hadn’t visited the moon in over a half century. But now? Twice in a week.
A growing number of companies are eyeing the moon as a source of commercial opportunities. Two private landings in under a week suggest our nearest celestial neighbor is open for business.
Rapidly falling launch costs have opened the door for smaller companies to take on more ambitious space missions, including efforts to land on the moon. NASA has also encouraged this activity. In 2018, the agency launched the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, incentivizing firms to build robotic landers and rovers in support of its plans to return humans to the moon.
Last year, Intuitive Machines’ Odysseus became the first private spacecraft to touch down on the lunar surface. But the vehicle toppled over onto its side in the process, limiting its ability to communicate and deploy experiments.
Last Sunday, however, US startup Firefly Aerospace achieved a clean touchdown with its Blue Ghost lander in the Mare Crisium basin. Meanwhile, Intuitive Machines experienced déjà vu on its second landing near the moon’s south pole on Friday when its Athena lander ended up on its side again.
Firefly’s 6.6-foot-tall lander launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on January 15 and entered lunar orbit on February 13. The solar-powered vehicle is carrying 10 NASA science experiments designed to gather data on the lunar surface. It will now conduct a 14-day mission before the lunar night’s frigid temperatures set in and disable the lander.
Things haven’t turned out as well for Intuitive Machines, whose spacecraft took a speedier path to the moon after launching on a Falcon 9 on February 26. The company experienced a repeat of the problems that took the shine off its first landing. Issues with its laser range finders meant the lander lost track of its trajectory above the moon and didn’t touch down properly.
After assessing the spacecraft, Intuitive Machines, who could play an important role in NASA’s plans to return humans to the moon later this decade, said the craft was on its side again, likely couldn’t revive its batteries, and declared the mission over.
“With the direction of the sun, the orientation of the solar panels, and extreme cold temperatures in the crater, Intuitive Machines does not expect Athena to recharge,” the company wrote in a statement Friday. “The mission has concluded, and teams are continuing to assess the data collected throughout the mission.”
Athena was carrying the agency’s Polar Resources Ice Mining Experiment, or PRIME-1, which NASA hoped could help the agency assess how easy it will be for astronauts to harvest water ice.
The experiment featured a drill called TRIDENT to extract lunar soil from three feet beneath the surface and a mass spectrometer to analyze the sample for water. Previous observations have suggested significant amounts of water ice is locked up in the soil at the moon’s south pole. This ice could prove a valuable resource for any future long-term outpost.
Athena was also carrying several robots made by Intuitive Machines, US startup Lunar Outpost, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as well as equipment from Nokia designed to power the moon’s first 4G cellular network.
The hope for both missions is that renewed interest in lunar exploration could soon spur a flourishing off-world economy with plenty of opportunities for the private sector.
In the short term, national space agencies like NASA are likely to be the primary customers for companies like Firefly and Intuitive Machines, which both received funding from the CLPS program. NASA is eager to find cheaper ways to get cargo to the moon on a regular basis to support its more challenging missions.
But there’s hope that in the longer term there could be opportunities for companies to carve out a niche harvesting resources like water ice to create rocket fuel and oxygen or the rare isotope helium-3, which could be used to power fusion reactors. These could be particularly attractive to other private companies looking to push further into the solar system and use the moon as a staging post.
Whether this vision pans out remains to be seen. But with several more private moon landings scheduled later this year, the first shoots of a burgeoning lunar economy seem to be emerging.
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