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Moon Express Sets Its Sights on Deliveries to the Moon and Beyond
A Florida start-up that is striving to become the first private company to put a spacecraft on the moon revealed an ambitious road map on Wednesday for a regular delivery service to send payloads there and elsewhere in the solar system.
Moon Express of Cape Canaveral, Fla., was founded in 2010 to win the Google Lunar X Prize, a competition offering a $20 million prize for the first private venture to get to the moon with a robotic lander by the end of 2017.
Robert D. Richards, the company’s chief executive, said Moon Express was on track to launch before the prize’s deadline. But even if the company does not win the prize, he said, Moon Express would still have a profitable future ferrying payloads for NASA and commercial customers.
“I think it’s big,” Dr. Richards said of the potential market, adding that he hoped its designs would “redefine the possible.”
The company released illustrations of its MX-1E lander, which it says will make the trip to the moon this year.
An earlier doughnut-shape design is now taller and thinner, about 3 feet wide and 4½ feet tall, more like a soda can with landing legs. Julie Arnold, a spokeswoman for Moon Express, said the lander would be a little bigger than the R2-D2 robot from the movie “Star Wars.”
The design change was made so that the lander would fit in a smaller rocket that Moon Express now plans to use for the first mission. “That’s considered our starter vehicle, our entry-level vehicle, to reach the moon,” Dr. Richards said.
The MX-1E then becomes like a Lego piece, allowing Moon Express to use it as a building block for larger spacecraft.
“Space vehicles and landers have traditionally been custom designed for each purpose,” Dr. Richards said. “What we’ve designed is a common core approach.”
Moon Express’s second mission would use a larger spacecraft that looks like two soda cans, one stacked on top of the other, essentially two MX-1Es. One is almost the same as the lander on the first mission. The second module — without landing legs — is a propulsion stage that would enable the spacecraft to reach the moon’s south pole, where ice persists inside craters that are eternally in shadows. .
Ice is a valuable resource for future human settlements, beyond providing water to drink. Water molecules broken up into hydrogen and oxygen could not only provide air for astronauts to breathe, but also rocket propellent. The ice at the bottom of the craters probably preserves molecules from the earliest days of the solar system, too, which could be a boon for scientists.
That same configuration, called MX-2, could also be sent as far away as the moons of Mars, but to land on Mars would require a more complex, more expensive vehicle beyond Moon Express’s current designs. “It can get basically anywhere in the inner solar system,” Dr. Richards said, meaning the neighborhood from the sun to Mars.
Two additional configurations would put together multiple building block propulsion modules in larger moon landers. A propulsion module at the center could serve as a smaller vehicle that could blast off from the moon, bringing back rocks and soil samples to Earth.
The cost of building and launching a MX-1E is less than $10 million, Dr. Richards said. NASA missions, by comparison, typically cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
“We want to collapse the cost of getting to the moon and by doing so, there is going to be a brand new market that is going to emerge,” Dr. Richards said.
He said he hoped that in the years to come, Moon Express would be launching at least twice a year.
Moon Express is not the only company betting on the moon, which has been largely overlooked since the end of NASA’s Apollo missions four decades ago.
The Google Lunar X Prize was intended to spur commercial endeavors, but the pace of progress has been slower and harder than organizers anticipated with the deadline extended twice. There will be no more extensions, X Prize officials have said.
Astrobotic Technology of Pittsburgh dropped out of the competition last year because the 2017 deadline proved unrealistic. It is still developing its Peregrine lander and now plans a 2019 launch, with 11 customers signed up.
“We’re happy with where we’re at,” said John Thornton, Astrobotic’s chief executive. He said Astrobotic was aiming to launch once every two years and then increase the rate to once a year.
Blue Origin, the rocket company created by Jeffrey P. Bezos, founder, chairman and chief executive of Amazon, has also expressed interest in traveling to the moon, proposing a large robotic spacecraft called Blue Moon to ship supplies for a future human settlement there.
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