NASA contractors share the grief of Israeli, Indian lunar failures

The team was gathered in a conference room last week, about 35 in all, ready to celebrate India’s triumph: the country’s first lunar landing. Like many watching the livestream broadcast from the control center in Bengaluru, John Thornton, the chief executive of Astrobotic, a Pittsburgh company that is developing a moon lander of its own, was confident India would stick it, setting off celebrations across the world.

But there was silence and long faces in India’s mission control, not celebration, when they lost contact with the lunar craft, and there was silence, too, in Astrobotic’s conference room, as Thornton’s team was reminded that the difficulties of orbital mechanics and the vacuum of space are not to be taken for granted. “Everything has to be working just right,” he said. “It’s like humankind against space.”

Soon it will be their turn to attempt to land on the moon. Astrobotic is one of nine companies that NASA is betting on as part of a program to deliver science experiments to the surface of the moon. The list is comprised of small startups, like Thornton’s venture, which grew out of Carnegie Mellon University, and industry stalwarts, such as Lockheed Martin and Draper, which provided navigation and guidance systems during the Apollo era.

NASA intends to invest $2.6 billion over 10 years in small contracts for delivery services to the moon under a program called Commercial Lunar Payload Services, or CLPS. That’s a small fraction of the estimated $20 to $30 billion it would spend on its Artemis program, which is designed to get humans to the moon’s surface by 2024.

Under CLPS, NASA isn’t designing, building or operating the landers that will make these lunar trips — that’s all up to the companies. Instead, NASA is simply hiring them to provide a FedEx-like service to a lifeless celestial body 240,000 miles away.

The endeavor is risky, the effort entrepreneurial, and failure is more than an option, NASA says, it’s likely. And that’s just how NASA wants it, as it tries to hit a cadence of two deliveries to the moon per year starting in 2021.

NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine likens the program to a venture capital fund investing in a startup, where the upside is as high as the risk of failure. And some of the companies NASA is looking to are unconventional. One, Firefly, went bankrupt in 2016 when it lost a key investor. Another, Masten, has just 12 employees and works out of a dusty barn in the Mojave desert.

“The idea is that it is low investment, high risk, which means some will fail,” Bridenstine said in an interview. “But if one is successful, the returns to NASA and the returns to the United States of America will be significant.”

Earlier this year, he told reporters, “It’s important we get back to the moon as fast as possible. We’re going to take shots on goal.”

Astrobotic plans its first moon mission in 2021. It would be the culmination of a long and unlikely odyssey. The company was co-founded in 2007 by a Carnegie Mellon University professor, who recruited his current and former robotics students to join him in building a spacecraft for the Google Lunar X Prize, then a competition to get payloads to the moon.

The company was able to drum up some money from angel investors and the university, but still it went through “nearly two deaths,” Thornton said. He took over as CEO, and refocused the company on trying to develop and market a commercial delivery service to the moon.

Earlier this year, however, NASA awarded it a $79.5 million contract, a big source of revenue for the small company that gave it a douse of credibility it hadn’t had before. Last month, it chose its ride to the moon, signing a deal with the United Launch Alliance to launch its Peregrine lunar lander, which stands at just over 6-feet tall, on ULA’s Vulcan Centaur rocket.

But getting to the moon is hard, as Israel learned in April when its Beresheet spacecraft crashed into the moon. It was a devastating outcome, but industry leaders and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was in the mission command center, vowed to learn from it and push on. “If at first you don’t succeed, you try again,” Netanyahu said.

Then last week, India lost communication with its spacecraft as it descended toward the moon, a heartbreaking outcome for the country’s space agency.