Within a few months, NASA may celebrate the first successful landing of an American spacecraft on the Moon in more than 50 years. This would be an immense confidence boost for commercial startups with an eye on the nascent market for lunar missions. It would also signal to NASA that it can rely on commercial companies for foundational elements of the agency's Artemis program to return humans to the Moon.
Realistically, there's also a chance that the first two commercial robotic lunar landing missions may miss the mark. One or both could crash on the lunar surface or otherwise falter along the journey from the Earth to the Moon. This wouldn't be a disaster. NASA officials have smartly set low expectations for these early commercial lunar missions, but these first landers are several years late, and a series of failures would inevitably raise questions about the program's future.
Five years after NASA started the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, two companies finally have lunar landers ready for final launch preparations. Astrobotic's robotic Moon lander, Peregrine, has been in storage since March at the company's headquarters in Pittsburgh. This week, Intuitive Machines showed off its completed Nova-C lander to Ars in Houston.
Both landers could ship to Cape Canaveral, Florida, within weeks as they prepare for launch windows later this year. Intuitive Machines is slated to launch first in mid-November on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket to start a roughly weeklong journey culminating in a landing near the Moon's south pole. Although it was ready to fly first, Astrobotic's launch date is more uncertain because of delays in United Launch Alliance's Vulcan rocket, the first of which will send Astrobotic's Peregrine lander toward the Moon. Right now, the earliest the Vulcan rocket could be ready to launch Astrobotic's lander is in December.
Thomas Zurbuchen, who led NASA's science division from 2016 until the end of 2022, recently told Ars that a successful landing by a CLPS (pronounced "clips") contractor would be an important demonstration of US leadership in space. "If a company can do what most countries and most agencies cannot do, that is really important," he said. "It makes you extremely optimistic about what is possible in space today.”
But it's taken a lot longer to get to this point than NASA and industry officials expected. Astrobotic and Intuitive Machines originally said they could be ready to land on the Moon in 2021. That was before the COVID pandemic put the brakes on the program.
"First, the supply chain was impacted by the pandemic," said Chris Culbert, NASA's CLPS program manager, in a meeting of lunar scientists last month. "Things slowed down."
It's been almost 51 years since the last time a US spacecraft achieved a soft landing on the Moon. Suppliers just weren't ready with on-the-shelf products to sell to Astrobotic or Intuitive Machines.
“Just because we know we used to be able to do it does not mean that we do today," Zurbuchen said.
"If you think about it, right now, we are funding probably more than two-thirds of the lunar landers ever built in human history, and we're doing it all at once," Culbert said. "The supply chain wasn't ready for that. That supply chain is starting to build out. We don't dictate the supply chain. I don't buy engines. I don't buy tanks. I don’t buy landing struts. These companies are doing it.
“If you asked me in 2018 or 2019, I would have bet a good dinner that it’s faster (than it has been)," Zurbuchen said. "What I didn’t know at that point was that there was going to be COVID, which certainly was a factor. But yeah, it took longer than I expected. That probably means that I misjudged the engineering development quite substantially.”
Five years in
Zurbuchen was instrumental in starting the CLPS program in 2018 as the Trump administration retargeted the Moon as NASA's next destination in space. The idea was to foster a market for commercial lunar missions, relying on firm fixed-price contracts similar to how NASA works with commercial providers to ferry crew and cargo to the International Space Station.
However, while NASA provided billions of dollars in government funding to SpaceX, Boeing, and Northrop Grumman for development of crew and cargo spacecraft to support the ISS, the agency is only buying cargo delivery services from commercial vendors. It's up to each company to raise money to develop their lunar lander, with the prospect of lucrative government contracts dangling to help lure investors.
“In that sense, it’s a lighter touch even than commercial cargo or commercial crew," Zurbuchen said.
These are robotic missions, not the larger commercially built landers from SpaceX and Blue Origin (although both are eligible for CLPS missions) that NASA has selected to carry astronauts to and from the Moon's surface on Artemis missions. The first wave of CLPS landers will deliver several tens of kilograms of NASA-funded instruments to the Moon through service contracts, allowing researchers to gather valuable data on lunar geology, plasma and dust, and precision landing technology.
“The opportunity to do science on the Moon was desperately needed," Culbert said. "We're getting some really groundbreaking science opportunities on the Moon.
“We have struggled, at times, with a lack of NASA's control over decisions on the commercial side," Culbert said. "We are paying the lion's share of the money, but these still aren’t NASA missions. That's a cultural change inside the agency.”
NASA officials in 2018 acknowledged the strategy underpinning CLPS was risky. Former NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine compared the strategy to taking "shots on goal," a sports analogy where not every shot is expected to land in the net.
Despite the long gap since the last US lunar landing, NASA found a lot of interest from the private sector in CLPS. NASA has selected 14 companies to become eligible for CLPS task orders, and five of the contractors have won competitions to actually fly missions to the Moon.
Intuitive Machines has won three task orders, and Astrobotic and Firefly Aerospace, headquartered in Central Texas, have each won two. Draper Laboratory and Masten Space Systems also received CLPS task orders from NASA, but Masten filed for bankruptcy last year, and that mission was canceled. NASA will move payloads assigned to the Masten lander to missions contracted to other companies.
Aside from the program's scientific purpose, CLPS was established to provide business opportunities for startups that could grow into long-term partners for NASA's lunar ambitions. Some CLPS contractors are also working on other technologies, such as power generation, data relay, and rovers, that could become crucial capabilities to support longer-duration astronaut stays on the Moon's surface.
Setting expectations
Early in the CLPS program, Zurbuchen guessed the initial batches of CLPS lander missions might have a 50-50 chance of success. NASA officials watched intently as private ventures like the Israeli Beresheet lunar lander and the Hakuto-R lander from the Japanese company ispace crashed on the Moon. Those missions did not have any significant NASA involvement.
A lander developed by India's space agency also crashed in 2019, but Indian engineers overcame the setback, tried again, and succeeded with a landing in August. Russia's Luna 25 mission also launched in August, but it plummeted to the Moon's surface after a botched engine burn.
China is three-for-three with robotic lunar landers since 2013, a remarkable streak of success that included the first landing on the far side of the Moon and an ambitious mission to return lunar rock samples to Earth.
All told, the world's roster of lunar landers has achieved a 50 percent success rate over the last decade, perfectly in line with Zurbuchen's prediction for the first few CLPS missions. We're about to find out if Astrobotic and Intuitive Machines beat those odds. If they don't, perhaps NASA will reassess its approach to the CLPS program.
“Suppose we’re at the end of ’24, we’ve done multiple landings and none of them work, I think it’s worth looking at the game. Did it make sense?" Zurbuchen told Ars. "I really considered it an experiment when I came up with the idea. Generally speaking, NASA has done well to bet on entrepreneurial entities to do very, very hard challenges. Of course, I believe this will be successful. I think it’s really important, come 2025 or so, to really look at the program and say, hey, is it successful? Are there things that NASA should do to affect the program one way or another?"
If necessary, NASA could change its relationship with the CLPS contractors to provide more government support. So far, NASA engineers have provided only high-level advice and recommendations to commercial lunar lander companies.
"Suppose it didn’t work, in ’25, that would be one of the variables I would look at. Should NASA have a tighter touch?" Zurbuchen said. "When I set up the program, I basically felt that when you turn on NASA oversight, it’s very hard to back off from that. It’s straightforward to add oversight. It is not straightforward to subtract oversight."
Experience with other programs has shown that NASA involvement usually drives up costs. Most of CLPS missions NASA has ordered so far have been valued at less than $100 million. That's a bargain compared to the cost of a typical NASA-managed science mission.
“We have essentially, at this point, committed more than $650 million to lunar activities," Culbert said. "That's a pretty big jump from where we were just five years ago.”
Let's say one or both of the first CLPS landers reach the lunar surface intact. NASA and industry officials say that outcome would help unlock the potential for commercial companies to do more than land on the Moon. If the commercial model works on the Moon, will it work for NASA's probes exploring the Solar System? This is an important question as NASA's planetary science budget is in disarray amid top-level government funding cuts and the ballooning cost of the agency's Mars Sample Return mission.
“From a science perspective, your mind starts going, can we use this model for other things?” Zurbuchen said. "How are we going to Mars? Commercially? You’ve seen some of the traditional approaches, at times, have struggled.”
Land it, and they will come?
The 14 companies in NASA's pool of CLPS providers include industry juggernauts like SpaceX, Lockheed Martin, and Blue Origin. But the winners of CLPS task orders so far have been smaller enterprises, with employee counts in the hundreds and not the thousands.
“Our money helped the companies over the hump," Culbert said.
But there's been a learning curve for these CLPS companies and for NASA itself, even before any of the landers reach the launch pad.
"Small companies, big companies, the companies that have won task orders, I have a lot of faith in not just the depth of their technical skill set, but in their understanding of doing complex missions," Culbert said. "Where they do sometimes lack is in their depth of staffing.
"For NASA missions, we are used to having an overwhelming access to resources, a lot of them. That's not true with these small companies. They don't have the depth to have 17 thermal engineers that can do 14 different forms of analysis to make sure that we understand exactly what's going to happen with the mission," Culbert said.
It wasn't just NASA that underestimated how long it would take to design, build, and launch a commercial Moon lander.
"One of the things that we underestimated going in was the state of the technology," said Trent Martin, vice president of space systems at Intuitive Machines. "We’ve been to the Moon before."
Intuitive Machines' Nova-C lander will carry cryogenic methane and liquid oxygen propellants, not the easier-to-use hypergolic fuel used on most of the other CLPS landers. The methane propulsion system offers higher efficiency, and Intuitive says it's easier to scale to larger lander designs.
"We originally set out to build a Chevrolet, and we built a Ferrari," Martin said. "I think we built a Ferrari because we’re aerospace engineers, and aerospace engineers like to build really cool things ... If you want the cheaper version of a mission, you can’t build a Ferrari every time.
“We ended up with a really, really unique design, and what we need is a more generic design," he said. "So we're striving to try to go back to generic designs wherever we can."
A vibrant lunar economy will hinge on finding commercial customers for the lunar lander builders, not just NASA. Some of the CLPS providers are thinking outside of the box to achieve this goal. Intuitive Machines has partnered with Columbia Sportswear to fly the clothier's trademark thermal-reflective liner on the Nova-C lander set for launch next month.
Dan Hendrickson, Astrobotic's vice president of business development, said the jury is still out on whether the CLPS initiative is ultimately successful.
"We have to actually land," he said. "We need to prove that we can offer these payload services. I'm not surprised that I don’t have 150 different (scientists) looking to do missions beating down my door right now, but if we land I think our phone is going to ring off the hook."
"I think there’s a big burden of proof that we all have to meet with our first landings, and providing payload services, not just landings, also providing services to actually accomplish science," Hendrickson said. "I think, once that happens, it’s going to change the mindset significantly.”
The CEO of the US subsidiary of ispace, which attempted to land on the Moon in April, shared a similar sentiment with Ars.
"I think what the market needs right now is it needs a proof of concept," said Ron Garan, CEO of ispace US, which is a partner with Draper on the CLPS program. "We’re rooting for the success of all the CLPS providers because the more we can demonstrate that this is feasible, that we can actually take payloads to the lunar surface, the more that’s going to enable commercial investment.
"The way that these business cases close is to add on to the CLPS missions with commercial payloads, and we need these successes to spark that demand. There is demand out there, but the demand is kind of patiently sitting back and watching because these missions are very, very expensive," he said. "So companies, before they make that investment, want to feel confident that there’s a good path to get there, and that has not, to date, been demonstrated."
