WASHINGTON — DARPA has chosen 14 corporations, starting from small startups to established aerospace corporations, to take part in a study on developing business lunar infrastructure.
DARPA announced Dec. 5 that 14 corporations will collaborate over the following seven months on its 10-12 months Lunar Architecture, or LunA-10, study. The goal of the hassle, announced in August, is to develop an integrated architecture to support a business lunar economy by the mid-2030s.
“LunA-10 has the potential to upend how the civil space community thinks about spurring widespread business activity on and across the Moon inside the following 10 years,” Michael Nayak, DARPA program manager for LunA-10, said in an announcement.
The 14 corporations chosen are:
- Blue Origin
- CisLunar Industries
- Crescent Space Services LLC
- Fibertek, Inc.
- Firefly Aerospace
- GITAI
- Helios
- Honeybee Robotics
- ICON
- Nokia of America
- Northrop Grumman
- Redwire Corporation
- Sierra Space
- SpaceX
The businesses, Nayak said in an announcement, each offered “a transparent vision and technically rigorous plan for advancing quickly towards our goal: a self-sustaining, monetizable, commercially owned-and-operated lunar infrastructure.”
The statement didn’t elaborate on the roles of every company, but in a presentation last month on the Beyond Earth Symposium, Nayak said corporations were chosen for work in six areas: communications and navigation; construction and robotics; market evaluation; mining and in situ resource utilization (ISRU); power; and transit, mobility and logistics.
Among the corporations have disclosed details about their roles in LunaA-10. CisLunar Industries, a Colorado-based startup, said it should work on what it calls the Material Extraction, Treatment, Assembly and Logistics, or METAL, framework for lunar resources as a part of the study.
Firefly Aerospace said in an announcement that it should outline an “aggregated hub of on-orbit spacecraft that dock together and offer on-demand services” based on its Elytra line of spacecraft. “We’ve identified a path to drastically improve on-orbit mission response times from years to days with scalable spacecraft hubs that may host and repair spacecraft across cislunar space,” Bill Weber, chief executive of Firefly, said in an announcement.
Construction technologies company ICON said its role in LunA-10 can be to leverage its work in 3D-printed construction technologies. “By participating in LunA-10, we are able to understand what inputs are going to be available, when, at what cost, and in what quantities,” said Evan Jensen, vice chairman of strategic research and development at ICON, in an announcement.
Sierra Space said it should deal with integrating technologies for extracting oxygen from lunar regolith. “At Sierra Space we recognize that to enable humanity’s prolonged exploration of space there may be a critical need for ISRU oxygen technology on the lunar surface, given its strategic importance by way of mobility, life support systems and potential business applications,” said Tom Vice, chief executive of Sierra Space, in an organization statement.
While corporations are bringing individual technologies and expertise to the hassle, the goal of LunA-10 is to mix them into an integrated architecture. “Can we bring a couple of portfolio of performers that communicate with one another as exemplars and representatives of this community and work together?” Nayak said on the symposium. By working together, the businesses will have the ability “to inform you to the gram, to the watt, to the dollar, what a lunar economy could appear to be by 2035.”
“DARPA finally did what the industry was waiting for,” said Gary Calnan, chief executive of CisLunar Industries. “The LunA-10 team has done a terrific job bringing together 14 corporations representing complementary parts of the long run lunar economy. This effort will lay the muse for a marketplace where your entire space domain can participate.”
Neither DARPA nor the businesses disclosed the worth of the LunA-10 awards, however the solicitation released in August said chosen corporations can be eligible for agreements valued at not more than $1 million each.
The LunA-10 participants will discuss their work at an April 2024 meeting of the Lunar Surface Innovation Consortium, a NASA-backed effort to develop technologies in most of the same areas because the DARPA study. The businesses will provide a final report back to DARPA in June 2024.