Commercial spacecraft are vying to land on the lunar surface, but can they jump-start a new space economy?
One day last December, John Walker Moosbrugger, a 25-year-old project manager for the lunar robotics start-up Astrobotic, sat in front of the company’s clean room and watched as an instrument older than him was attached to a 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.
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 of the load.
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 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.
Geopolitics also helped CLPS get off the ground. Zurbuchen was able to secure that $2.6 billion in part because of Trump’s moon ambitions and in part because of American fears of China’s rise in space. In December 2020 a Chinese lander and rover arrived at the moon’s south pole, collecting samples that were later returned to Earth.
“We went from 50 years of nothing going to the moon to seven deliveries scheduled over the next three and a half years,” Chris Culbert, who manages the CLPS program at the NASA Johnson Space Center, said at a panel discussion in November 2021. On its first mission, set for the fourth quarter of 2022, Astrobotic’s Peregrine Lunar Lander will carry two dozen payloads—including the SEAL instrument—to Lacus Mortis, a hexagonal lava plain on the northeastern face of the moon’s near side. One of Intuitive Machines’ Nova-Cs will carry six payloads to Oceanus Procellarum, a vast dark plain on the western edge of the moon.
Other experiments scheduled for launch in the next six years will study how spacecraft landings affect lunar regolith, scouring spacecraft and habitats. They will investigate the radiation environment on the moon; study its carbon dioxide, methane and other volatile substances; search for water ice; and monitor radio waves at the surface, informing plans for radio telescopes to be built on the moon in the future.
Anderson says this wave of experiments could lead to a profitable cycle in which the first instruments make promising finds, leading to more questions and ultimately to new interest from prospectors who want to locate and extract whatever the moon has to offer. “The CLPS program is a very elegant way of stimulating a market and stimulating multiple companies in a market,” he says.
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