Commercial Lunar Payload Services Program (CLPS)

[A_M_Swallow]

From the Users Advisory Group meeting that just happened, this slide.  NASA's lunar roadmap for the next decade.

So within 15 years NASA aims to have men back on the Moon.

(The slide says 10 but these things are always late.)

[theinternetftw]

Busy day.  From the "providers" session of LEAG:

Moon Express
  - Based on his responses in the Q&A, Bob Richards seems like the real deal and has real insights.
  - But their presentation shows another side: it was nothing but mockups, photoshop, and a reminder that they've paid to take over a pad.
  - This quote pull is for Lar: "The MX-1 is sized and constrained to go under the shroud of Electron, that is true, but as we put these lego pieces together into different configurations, they are aligned with other existing and emerging launch companies.  The MX-2 system (two MX-1s stacked vertically) is sized to go into the Virgin Orbit LauncherOne. [...] The MX-5 module (five MX-1s stuck into a pentaweb) is designed to go into the back of a Dragon and can become a tug..."  It goes up to MX-9 with a payload capability of 500kg in a "return configuration."
  - The 500kg MX-9 payload capacity was the only number in the presentation.
  - In Q&A, says they have 10 non-NASA customers for first mission, and that their second mission has a non-NASA anchor customer, the International Lunar Observatory Association, who want to put an observatory on the lunar south pole. They're also partnered with NanoRacks for payload integration.

Astrobotic
  - Peregrine lander.  $1.2M / kg to the lunar surface.
  - Different lander configs: core lander; a config for high latitudes; a config that lets a heavy thing take up the entire top of the lander (like a rover that would then roll off); a polar config with the solar panel on the side.  Core lander config will land first.
  - In the "heavy-thing-on-top" config, could take 265kg to the moon.
  - first mission:
    - 35kg of "non-NASA payload", holding an undisclosed amount of kg for NASA should they win CLPS
    - Surface life of 8 days
    - Comms: 20 kbps per kg (will be 10 kbps per kg in future, "core lander config" is light so more b/w available)
    - Power: 0.5 W per kg
    - Area: 0.5 m^2 per deck surface (4 decks, but can use top and bottom of deck)
    - Ideal payload mass: 1kg-15kg per payload to lunar orbit or surface
    - Typical payloads: Cubesats (3U to 6U), small rovers, resource instruments, seismometers, retroreflectors , telescopes
    - Launches as a secondary payload on an Atlas V
    - 12 signed payload deals for first mission.
  - Partnered with Airbus for systems, DHL (shrug), ULA for launch, Dynetics for propulsion integration
  - Contracted to deliver payloads for Mexico, Ecuador, Columbia
  - Show a shot of Frontier Aerospace hot-firing their engine in vacuum; how they ended up getting this gig is a story worth reading.
  - Currently in the middle of the test campaign for their upcoming system-level CDR.
  - Just finished their flight CPU and power management electronics, currently being tested
  - Selected for a Tipping Point award for Terrain Relative Navigation. Should enable 100m landing accuracy. 
    - Will have that TRN hardware onboard their first flight as a demonstration payload.
  - Peregrine's User's Guide v3.0 released: https://www.astrobotic.com/payload-user-guide [pdf]

Masten
  - Gives a long parable about moon dreams
    - We're farmers and winter is ending. Need to plant now before winter comes again (and it will).
    - These are some beaten down moon folks.
  - Masten have been spending the winter getting good at propulsion, payload integration, and contracting.
  - XL-1 lander
    - Total mass capacity: 100kg - two 50kg "saddlebag" cargo bays
    - Volume for a single bay: 31.5" x 24.6" x 19.7"
    - 50W power per bay, 28 VDC
    - Structural interface: "Fastened to regularly spaced grid pattern"
    - Power interface: Up to 4.5A @ 28 VDC (AIAA S-133-5-2013)
    - Thermal Control: Passive (Conductive, Radiative), Optional Heater Service
    - Data: RS-422 (EIA-422-B), SpaceWire (ECSS-E-ST-50-12C), Optional 1553B Service
  - Throws out a sentence about plans for larger landers, a space tug
  - Focused on "the core thing": being able to do a controlled landing. "That's what we're going to deliver. And we're going to work with you and other folks in the community to put together a total solution that meets the needs of the customer."

SpaceX
  - Standard generic Wooster talk.  Which means it's a BFR talk.  He's clearly there for offline networking.

iSpace
  - Gives Google Lunar X Prize history
  - Raised $94.5M Series A, the largest Series A in Japan
  - That constitutes financing for development and missions 1 and 2
  - Mission 1, Q2 2020 (only company to give any kind of launch date)
    - Orbiter-only mission
    - Will do a lunar impact
    - Had a successful Misison 1 PDR in July 2018
    - Launch mass: ~550kg / 285kg (dry?)
    - Payload: 10kg
    - Height: 2.1m
    - Rocket: F9 to GTO, takes itself to lunar orbit
  - Mission 2 will be the landing, Q2 2021
    - Launch mass: ~1400kg / 350kg (dry?)
    - Payload: 30kg
    - Height: 2.4m
    - Landing site: Lacus Mortis
  - Reminder that they've partnered with Draper Labs, General Atomics, Spaceflight Inc, to try to get in on CLPS.
  - Has a metric ton of Japanese partners.

Q&A
  - About halfway through, everyone takes a second to pour one out for Planetary Resources.
    - This was in response to a former PR employee coming up and asking how they plan to be resilient to the whims of investors.

[A_M_Swallow]

{snip}

SpaceX
  - Standard generic Wooster talk.  Which means it's a BFR talk.  He's clearly there for offline networking.

{snip}

The classic problems are appearing when a company competes with its customers. Landers from Moon Express, Astrobotic and Masten are all potential users of the Falcon 9.

The BFR team will now have to worry did SpaceX slighting Falcon 9 customers hurt sales to future BFR customers?

At future events SpaceX will have to use different marketing men for the Falcon 9 and BFR.

[meberbs]

From the Users Advisory Group meeting that just happened, this slide.  NASA's lunar roadmap for the next decade.

So within 15 years NASA aims to have men back on the Moon.

(The slide says 10 but these things are always late.)

Normally I would 100% agree with your final comment. In this case I feel compelled to point out, for a sufficiently narrow definition of "these things," there is exactly one historical example of this being done before. It was proposed in 1961, with a deadline of the end of the decade, and achieved its goal with half a year to spare.

Yes, I know the reasons that worked are no longer applicable, but the commercial movement in this direction may make it happen again. (At least I hope so, and that is ignoring that BFR could potentially solve the challenge by pure brute force from a parallel development path.)

[A_M_Swallow]

From the Users Advisory Group meeting that just happened, this slide.  NASA's lunar roadmap for the next decade.

So within 15 years NASA aims to have men back on the Moon.

(The slide says 10 but these things are always late.)

Normally I would 100% agree with your final comment. In this case I feel compelled to point out, for a sufficiently narrow definition of "these things," there is exactly one historical example of this being done before. It was proposed in 1961, with a deadline of the end of the decade, and achieved its goal with half a year to spare.

Yes, I know the reasons that worked are no longer applicable, but the commercial movement in this direction may make it happen again. (At least I hope so, and that is ignoring that BFR could potentially solve the challenge by pure brute force from a parallel development path.)

To estimate the scaling factor try ratio of development time for Orion to Apollo Command Module.

[ncb1397]

From the Users Advisory Group meeting that just happened, this slide.  NASA's lunar roadmap for the next decade.

So within 15 years NASA aims to have men back on the Moon.

(The slide says 10 but these things are always late.)

Normally I would 100% agree with your final comment. In this case I feel compelled to point out, for a sufficiently narrow definition of "these things," there is exactly one historical example of this being done before. It was proposed in 1961, with a deadline of the end of the decade, and achieved its goal with half a year to spare.

Yes, I know the reasons that worked are no longer applicable, but the commercial movement in this direction may make it happen again. (At least I hope so, and that is ignoring that BFR could potentially solve the challenge by pure brute force from a parallel development path.)

To estimate the scaling factor try ratio of development time for Orion to Apollo Command Module.

Service module started development in 2012 and the the launch vehicle a year or so earlier. What dependancies for the deployment of a lunar lander are starting development after it?

[meberbs]

To estimate the scaling factor try ratio of development time for Orion to Apollo Command Module.

This is the thread for commercial lunar services. I stated that my assumption was commercial development. Orion is about as far from commercial development as you can get.

If you want to compare Apollo era NASA to modern commercial development, you could pick something such as time between the first orbital Saturn I to the first Saturn V, compared to the first successful Falcon 1 to the first Falcon 9 launch. There are major problems with this comparison too, particularly a tendency for cherry picking, but that applies to all such comparisons. My original post used a single data point for reference, which is not useful for proving much of anything, which is why I expressed my statement as a hope.

[theinternetftw]

Busy day.  From the "providers" session of LEAG:
<snip>
 - Peregrine's User's Guide v3.0 released: https://www.astrobotic.com/payload-user-guide [pdf]

Just a bit from that Astrobotic guide, which is really detailed and almost twice as long as their old guide:

$1,200,000/kg to the lunar surface (as already mentioned).
$2,000,000/kg to the lunar surface if attached to an Astrobotic rover.
$300,000/kg to a 100km x 750km lunar orbit.  100km x 8700km available on request.

Peregrine can be reconfigured to accommodate a smallsat on top of it, making it an orbital tug.

Mail a 0.5" x 0.125" package to the moon for $460.  Scales to 1" x 2" for $25K.
That service was announced in 2017.  I'd completely forgotten about it.

M1 Lander: 1.9m Height  |  2.5m Diameter  |  1,283kg Wet Mass

1st mission: 35kg capacity (plus NASA reserved space)  |  2nd mission 175kg  |  3rd mission 265kg
265kg is the nominal max payload for Peregrine

Five 667N Main Engines using MMH/MON-25  |  Twelve 45N ACS Engines using MMH/MON-25

Flight Computer: LEON3FT, which is a dual-core fault-tolerant SPARC processor.  Going to the moon using a CPU architecture from Sun Microsystems.  That's pretty great.

M1 Mission:
Lunar Orbits: 100km x 8700km, hold 12hrs  | 100km x 750km, hold 48hrs  |  100km x 100km, hold 72hrs
Powered Descent Duration (after deorbit burn and coast): 600s
Maximum Horizontal Landing Velocity: 0.5m/s  |  Maximum Vertical Landing Velocity: 2.0m/s

Lacus Mortis is the landing site for M1 (also where iSpace plans to land). 43.914° N, 25.148° E.
Landing ellipse: 24km x 6km  |  Effective slope: Less than 12 degrees  |  Greatest expected rock height: 0.35m
Local landing time: 55-110 hours after lunar sunrise. (354 hours == 1 Lunar day)

Launch phase: 1-3 hours  |  Cruise phase: 3-33 days  |  Orbit phase: 4-25 days  |  Surface phase: 8 days

There's a Centaur "Earth-departure burn" before sep.  Then Peregrine will do a Perigee raise, then TLI.

Tons more in the guide.  Attached below for posterity.  Compare with the v2.1 guide, which is in this thread.

[theinternetftw]

Just noticed something.  Astrobotic said in the LEAG meeting that they're currently getting ready for CDR.  If they're following the schedule outlined in their User Guide, they are somewhere around 22-29 months from launch.

[theinternetftw]

Also from the LEAG meeting:

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is receiving CLPS funding to help characterize landing sites for commercial landers.

[Lar]

- This quote pull is for Lar: "The MX-1 is sized and constrained to go under the shroud of Electron, that is true, but as we put these lego pieces together into different configurations, they are aligned with other existing and emerging launch companies.  The MX-2 system (two MX-1s stacked vertically) is sized to go into the Virgin Orbit LauncherOne. [...] The MX-5 module (five MX-1s stuck into a pentaweb) is designed to go into the back of a Dragon and can become a tug..."  It goes up to MX-9 with a payload capability of 500kg in a "return configuration."

Thanks for thinking of me, LOL But I can't help but think that 9 of these lashed together would be ungainly. So much system duplication. But if it worked for Falcon?

SpaceX
  - Standard generic Wooster talk.  Which means it's a BFR talk.  He's clearly there for offline networking.

It must be hard to listen to people talk about their 50kg payload landers when you have a 50,000kg lander in the works....
 

[A_M_Swallow]

SpaceX
  - Standard generic Wooster talk.  Which means it's a BFR talk.  He's clearly there for offline networking.

It must be hard to listen to people talk about their 50kg payload landers when you have a 50,000kg lander in the works....
 

SpaceX may have to buy small landers to build the landing pad for its heavy lander. A 50,000kg lander will have similar problems to the Apollo LEMs only bigger.

[speedevil]

SpaceX may have to buy small landers to build the landing pad for its heavy lander. A 50,000kg lander will have similar problems to the Apollo LEMs only bigger.

'Have to' - a hell of a lot of things have to go right for you for that to be the case.

SpaceX already has landers that can cope to deliver stuff intact from the near surface without landing.
They're called Teslas, and cope fine with a 30mph impact.

BFS seems very likely to be able to land without incident, the only issue is you may not be able to get it back if the surface is worst case.

To step back to 'proper' designs, commercially available tanks (And I mean normal industrial ones, not aerospace), with hypergols and superdraco are quite enough to land some 20 tons, if dropped off in LLO.

The tanks may weigh 20 tons extra. So what?

For there to be a place for themselves in a environment with BFS means you have to bring a lot to the table that SpaceX can't do easier just by sacrificing a little mass.
There may be a transitory place if BFS keeps prices lots higher than costs - if for example $1B/100 tons in LLO was the cost, you might be able to make a case for your own lander.

'Rockets aren't lego' gets a lot weaker on the moon, for nonreusable unmanned landers deployed from a main craft.
Gravity and escape velocity is so low that large mass growth is not too big of an issue.
There are no aero issues.
Thermal issues almost go away, as you have a total exposure outside of a conditioned environment of a few minutes, and if longer, due to no aero issues, can simply wrap MLI around your craft and get pretty good insulation for an hour or three.
Power isn't an issue, as batteries are quite good enough.
You can land quite a long way above the surface and hit at modest speeds.

For CLPS landers to have a place in this future, they need to be very special.
An off-the-shelf methalox 50kg payload reusable lander - perhaps.

The moon is weird. Your main ship may be able to get close enough to do really quite in depth investigations while still in orbit on the flatter or pointier bits.

[docmordrid]

Sounds like the science community is interested.

ScienceMag...

NASA to pay private space companies for moon rides

Next month, almost a half-century since the United States last landed a spacecraft on the moon, NASA is expected to announce plans for a return. But the agency will just be along for the ride. Rather than unveiling plans for its own spacecraft, NASA will name the private companies it will pay to carry science experiments to the moon on small robotic landers.

Under a program called Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS), NASA would buy space aboard a couple of launches a year, starting in 2021. The effort is similar to an agency program that paid private space companies such as Elon Musk's SpaceX to deliver cargo to the International Space Station (ISS). "This a new way of doing business," says Sarah Noble, a planetary scientist at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C., who is leading the science side of NASA's lunar plans.

Scientists are lining up for a ride. "It really feels like the future of lunar exploration," says Erica Jawin, a planetary scientist at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. She and other attendees at the annual meeting of the Lunar Exploration Analysis Group in Columbia, Maryland, last week were eager to show NASA why their small experiments would be worthy hitchhikers on the landers.

[A_M_Swallow]

{snip}
For CLPS landers to have a place in this future, they need to be very special.
An off-the-shelf methalox 50kg payload reusable lander - perhaps.

The moon is weird. Your main ship may be able to get close enough to do really quite in depth investigations while still in orbit on the flatter or pointier bits.

CLPS lunar lander missions expected to start in 2021. That is only 3 years away. The SpaceX BFS is likely to be several years later that that. It could also be more expensive.

[docmordrid]

>
CLPS lunar lander missions expected to start in 2021. That is only 3 years away. The SpaceX BFS is likely to be several years later that that. It could also be more expensive.

The roadmap calls for a "human scale descent module" by 2024 soon followed by a "reusable lunar ascent vehicle." Musk, answering a direct question about a Moon base,  tweeted "2025."

Space News...

[A_M_Swallow]

>
CLPS lunar lander missions expected to start in 2021. That is only 3 years away. The SpaceX BFS is likely to be several years later that that. It could also be more expensive.

The roadmap calls for a "human scale descent module" by 2024 soon followed by a "reusable lunar ascent vehicle." Musk, answering a direct question about a Moon base,  tweeted "2025."

{snip}

"Demonstrate human-scale Descent Module by 2024"

A good start but an Ascent Module and cabin with life support will also be needed, which NASA is probably assuming will take until 2028 to develop.

Note: Did the Xeus lander from Masten and ULA pass its System Concept Design Reviews 1 and 2?

[speedevil]

{snip}
For CLPS landers to have a place in this future, they need to be very special.
An off-the-shelf methalox 50kg payload reusable lander - perhaps.

The moon is weird. Your main ship may be able to get close enough to do really quite in depth investigations while still in orbit on the flatter or pointier bits.

CLPS lunar lander missions expected to start in 2021. That is only 3 years away. The SpaceX BFS is likely to be several years later that that. It could also be more expensive.

That does not answer 'may have to buy'.

[A_M_Swallow]

{snip}
For CLPS landers to have a place in this future, they need to be very special.
An off-the-shelf methalox 50kg payload reusable lander - perhaps.

The moon is weird. Your main ship may be able to get close enough to do really quite in depth investigations while still in orbit on the flatter or pointier bits.

CLPS lunar lander missions expected to start in 2021. That is only 3 years away. The SpaceX BFS is likely to be several years later that that. It could also be more expensive.

That does not answer 'may have to buy'.

The surface of the Moon is not a nice place - it has many rocks, boulders and crevices which caused the Apollo LEM landers problems. The BFS is too big to fit between many of these rocks. See the picture of the hazard area NASA built to test the Morpheus lander.



A smaller lander can fit between more of the rocks and unload say a bull dozer able to clear a landing area for the BFS. A landing pad with a solid surface, so the BFS does not fall over, would be a second improvement.

SpaceX could design its own mini lander and bull dozer but will probably find it cheaper to buy an off the shelf small payload lander.

[Joffan]

SpaceX could design its own mini lander and bull dozer but will probably find it cheaper to buy an off the shelf small payload lander.

Do they have a Home Depot card? Probably could get a few hundred K discount, at least. :-)

Personally I'd have thought that their experience with Dragon abort modes and Falcon stage landing on ships would make a small tough lander fairly straightforward for SpaceX.