 Commercial lunar infrastructure could benefit startups like Interlune, which proposes harvesting helium-3 on the Moon. (credit: Interlunio) |
by Jeff Foust
Monday, May 20, 2024
In recent weeks, you may have heard a two-word phrase whose individual words were very familiar to you but which, until now, had rarely been combined: moon railroad. Earlier this month, NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC), the agency's program that funds work on early-stage technologies, awarded a Phase 2 grant for a project called Flexible One-Way Levitation (FLOAT) to create a kind of maglev railway on the Moon and other planetary bodies. “We want to build the first lunar rail system, which will provide reliable, autonomous and efficient payload transportation on the Moon,” explained JPL's Ethan Schaler, who is leading the work on FLOAT.
| Nayak said the goal of LunA-10 was to bring together companies offering different lunar services, from transportation to communications to energy, “and form a kind of consortium” that could combine those services into a commercial ecosystem. |
The FLOAT grant announcement came about a month and a half after Northrop Grumman announced its own lunar railroad project. The company said it won a DARPA grant to study a “lunar railway network that could transport humans, supplies and resources for commercial enterprises across the lunar surface.” Unlike NIAC's announcement, Northrop did not go into technical details about its rail concept, beyond describing how the study will examine issues ranging from interfaces to costs.
Northrop's lunar railroad award is part of a project called the 10-Year Lunar Architecture Capability Study, or LunA-10, at DARPA. When the agency announced plans for LunA-10 last August, it surprised many people: Why was DARPA looking at lunar architecture when NASA had already developed its Moon-to-Mars Architecture and outlined plans to refine and update it annually?
Michael “Orbit” Nayak, DARPA director for LunA-10, said last summer that DARPA had coordinated its plans for the project with NASA. “We set out to talk to NASA, find out what they're doing, determine what their roadmap is, and then see if there are any other complementary investments we can make to significantly advance the state of the art that is somewhat in line with their typical DARPA mission,” he said then.
The goal of the effort, he said, was to bring together companies that offered different lunar services, from transportation to communications to energy, “and form a kind of consortium” that could combine those services into a commercial ecosystem. The project began with a “commercial end state” that, within ten years, there would be a self-sustaining lunar economy, working backwards to identify key technical and economic issues.
At a meeting last month of the Lunar Surface Innovation Consortium, DARPA discussed initial results from the LunaA-10 study. Phil Root, director of DARPA's Strategic Technology Office, described the agency's hypothesis that “investments in maturing technology for lunar infrastructure could make a significant difference in catalyzing the lunar economy” that would prove MonA-10. “We believe that LunA-10 has supported that hypothesis.”
Later in the consortium meeting, Nayak discussed the work that had been done by the 13 companies selected for the LunA-10 awards last December. (DARPA had selected 14 companies and it was unclear what happened to the fourteenth, Nokia.) Those companies had explored various concepts for providing services on the Moon, many of which were summarized in a slide deck released by the consortium.
Companies proposed a wide range of capabilities. Fibertek offered a concept called the Lunar Infrastructure Optical Node (LION), a base station that could provide navigation and communications services, as well as power transmission. Icon, a company that uses 3D printing technology to produce structures, offered an approach to developing runways, roads and paths from lunar regolith. Sierra Space outlined a system to generate oxygen from regolith.
The two companies that build lunar landers for NASA's Human Landing System program also participated in LunA-10. Blue Origin described how its Blue Moon lander, starting with the smaller Mark 1 cargo version, could be used to build lunar infrastructure, and the company also proposed how it could be used as a power and communications system.
| “We will not have a commercial lunar economy until we can not just survive the night but operate all night long,” Nayak said. |
As expected, SpaceX explained how Starship could support a lunar base, starting with three Starship landings: one that serves as a power, communications, and other services hub, a second that carries heavy equipment, and a third that serves as a habitat. for the crew. Those Starships would remain on the Moon, with their propellant tanks reused to store other fluids and gases and other unnecessary components, such as Raptor engines, “harvested and processed as raw materials,” the company explained in a slide. (Nayak later called it “re-ISRU” or in-situ recyclable resource utilization).
“They are a great enabler for the lunar economy,” he said of SpaceX and Starship. “It's an unprecedented amount of mass that can be released in one go.”
However, the study sought not only to have individual companies showcase their technologies and systems, but also to explore how those capabilities would interact with each other. Blue Origin, for example, included in its slides a complex diagram of how its capabilities would serve and be served by those being developed by other companies in the LunA-10 study. Other companies described who they could sell to and who they could buy from.
 A graphic from Blue Origin's LunA-10 slides showing how the companies involved would use each other's products and services. (credit: Blue Origin) |
It also identified possible new services needed for this lunar architecture. “Under LunA-10 we have come to realize this idea of 'thermal as a service,'” Nayak said. This is a thermal management that rejects excess heat during the lunar day and generates heat at night. He said studies showed that between 40% and 50% of the mass of spacecraft sent to the lunar surface involved their thermal management systems. If, instead, that could be offered as a service, “then it would have reduced its cost to the Moon in half or doubled the capacity it can provide.”
“We will not have a commercial lunar economy until we can no longer simply survive the night but operate all night long,” he added.
The presentations described in detail how the various infrastructure providers would work with each other, providing products and services to each other. However, there was much less discussion about who else would use that infrastructure: who will need that power, communications, thermal management, transportation and other services?
“The lunar economy is going to be diverse. All kinds of users, going to all kinds of places,” Nayak said in a discussion of power needs on the Moon, but did not elaborate on the users or the locations.
One potential user of that infrastructure is a startup called Interlune, founded by former Blue Origin executives Rob Meyerson and Gary Lai. The company formally came out of stealth mode earlier this year to reveal its plans to prospect and eventually collect helium-3, not for fusion reactors that don't yet exist, but for other applications, such as medical imaging and quantum computing.
“We are focused on increasing the supply of helium-3,” Meyerson, Interlune's chief executive, said in an interview on stage at the 39th Space Symposium last month. “We have customers who are aligned and interested.”
He said Interlune focused on helium-3 because of its high price: $20 million per kilogram. “It is the only resource that has a high enough price to justify going to the Moon and bringing it back. “We needed something like that to anchor the business case.”
Interlune is planning three missions, starting with one in late 2026 or early 2027 that would conduct initial surveys. Two more, between 2028 and 2030, would first establish a pilot plant to collect helium-3 from the lunar regolith and then an operational plant that would return helium-3 for sale to customers.
| “I think this is inevitable. “I think going to the Moon to stay is inevitable,” Meyerson said. |
Meyerson said the company will make use of commercial lunar landers, such as those flown on Commercial Lunar Cargo Services missions for NASA. In terms of other infrastructure, he said he saw gaps in energy and return-to-Earth capacity. He did not specifically mention whether something like the architecture proposed by LunA-10, whose interim results have not yet been published, would be useful.
The discussion panel at the consortium meeting did not elaborate on other users of this infrastructure or their willingness to pay. “We're now in a phase where we're looking at what the return on investment is,” Root said. “Now we're looking at what the return on investment is: what the size of the investment is and how big that return is, both in dollars and in terms of national priorities.”
Nayak envisioned turning LunaA-10 into a book that would serve as a “field guide to the lunar economy,” offering a snapshot of technologies and services over time. He would also include what he described as “outside perspectives” on topics ranging from insurance to space law.
At the Space Symposium, Meyerson was optimistic about the long-term prospects for lunar commercialization and, with it, the necessary infrastructure. “I think this is inevitable. “I think going to the Moon to stay is inevitable and now we have the opportunity to invest alongside the investment that NASA and its partner countries are making to do something really good.”
That said, there's probably no rush to buy a ticket to ride the Shackleton Express just yet.
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