NASA's support of private spaceflight has helped spur competition between companies like SpaceX, United Launch Alliance, and Blue Origin, and that rocket race has driven launch costs to historic lows. The next step will give industry a chance to take the reins a little farther from home by putting the first private lander on the surface of the moon.



This move became crystal clear last week when NASA confirmed the cancellation of Resource Prospector, a lunar rover program in the planning stages, and announced a new request for private industry to build lunar landers.

Fly NASA to the Moon

Resource Prospector, which had been tentatively scheduled to launch around 2022, would have been about one-third the mass of the Mars Curiosity rover. Its mission was to scout the polar regions of the moon for resources such as hydrogen, oxygen, and water ice. The lunar rover was seen as a precursor to sending human astronauts back to the moon, one of NASA's primary goals after President Trump signed Space Policy Directive 1 late last year.

The Resource Prospector prototype searches for a buried sample tube at the Johnson Space Center rock yard in August 2015. NASA

Many lunar scientists were taken aback by the cancellation of Resource Prospector. An April 26 letter to NASA from the Lunar Exploration Analysis Group (LEAG), a group of NASA-affiliated lunar scientists, said:

"This action is viewed with both incredulity and dismay by our community, especially as the President’s Space Policy Directive 1 directs NASA to go to the lunar surface. RP was the only polar lander-rover mission under development by NASA (in fact, by any nation, as all of the international missions to the lunar poles are static landers) and would have been ready for preliminary design review at the beginning of 2019."

However, the death of Resource Prospector was foreshadowed in NASA's fiscal year 2019 budget request released in February, which included no funding for the program. Newly appointed NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, a long-time advocate of returning to the moon, echoed the budget proposal and confirmed plans to fly instruments from Resource Prospector on other missions in a tweet last Friday.

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We’re committed to lunar exploration @NASA. Resource Prospector instruments will go forward in an expanded lunar surface campaign. More landers. More science. More exploration. More prospectors. More commercial partners. Ad astra! https://t.co/FaxO6WUDow — Jim Bridenstine (@JimBridenstine) April 27, 2018

Also on Friday, NASA released a draft request for proposals (RFP) for a Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program. The purpose is "to acquire end-to-end payload services between the Earth and lunar surface for NASA Headquarters' Science, Human Exploration and Operations and Science Technology Mission Directorates." A formal request for proposals to build small moon landers that could launch as early as 2019 is expected in July. The CLPS program compliments a prior NASA request for information (RFI) for Lunar Surface Cargo Transportation Services, last updated in April, which seeks medium-to-large lunar landers capable of depositing 500 kg (1,100 lbs.) or more of payload on the moon by 2022.

The writing's on the regolith: NASA wants private companies to start flying the agency's science instruments to the moon.

On the Lunar Doorstep?

The move to rely on businesses for lunar landings is something of a gamble. For one thing, no company has ever landed a spacecraft on the moon, though the industry might be on the lunar doorstep.

Google's $20 million competition to land on the moon, the Lunar X Prize, ended in January without a winner, but many of the companies that competed in that competition still plan lunar landings.

Moon Express, one of the American competitors, plans to land progressively larger spacecraft on the moon to access lunar resources, conduct science experiments, and eventually take on sample-return missions. Bob Richards, CEO and co-founder of Moon Express, sees lunar missions as the next step in industry contributions to space exploration.

"The commercial launch industry and the emerging commercial lunar landing/exploration industries are completely synergistic," Richards told Popular Mechanics in an email. "NASA is using the same proven templates for commercial lunar landing/exploration partner development as it did for its partners in the commercial launch industry."

Moon Express's first lander design, MX-1, will be capable of carrying up to 30 kg of payload to the moon, and the company hopes to have the spacecraft ready to launch next year. "Our earliest viable lunar expedition is late 2019," Richards says.

Concept image of a MX-1 lander on the lunar surface. Moon Express

The lunar exploration company, however, is developing its MX spacecraft and 3D-printed PECO rocket engines to ultimately be available in larger configurations with two, five, and nine engines.

"Our MX-9 is capable of landing 500 kg of payload on the surface of the moon, including rovers and sample return," Richards says. "The MX-9 is in alignment with NASA's medium class definition under its Lunar Surface Cargo Transportation Services program and can be ready for a 2022 launch."

The Once and Future Moon

The original 2012 target date for the Lunar X Prize came and went without a winner. So did other subsequent deadlines. So some skepticism regarding whether private industry is really ready to send landers to the moon is understandable.

Jack Burns, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Colorado at Boulder and the director of the Lunar University Network for Astrophysics (LUNAR), told Popular Mechanics in an email that "RP [Resource Prospector] was by far the closest project that NASA has which is near 'shovel ready' and would get us back to exploring the moon relatively quickly." However, Burns says the program might have already been heading toward cooperation with private industry. "I think the plan was to partner with a commercial company to design and build the lander."



With the new call for commercial landers, and the scrapping of its only independent surface mission, NASA apparently believes industry is ready to bear the lunar burden. If companies prove as effective at landing on the moon as they have at launching rockets, then the futuristic picture of human activity on Luna—including resource prospecting and manufacturing on the moon—could be coming into focus.

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