In December, DARPA announced that it was working with 14 different companies under LunA-10, including major space players such as Northrop Grumman and SpaceX, as well as non-space firms such as Nokia. These companies are assessing how services such as power and communications could be established on the Moon, and they’re due to provide a final report by June.
I won’t consider any plans “serious” until they admit the SLS isn’t going to be part of them.
Isn’t it a big government business that hires a lot of people?
What politician would want to cancel that and lose votes?
SLS is a pretty badass rocket but damn is it expensive, prohibitively so.
I wonder if there’s a more achievable lunar architecture that just uses a ton of Falcon Heavy launches instead. Maybe a lunar cycler?
Given that SpaceX Starship is already on the critical path for Artemis anyway, I’d plan on using that if I was in charge. Falcon/Dragon launches can be used to put crew in space if Starship itself can’t be man-rated in time.
Yeah I’m mostly worried about the time it takes to get Starship stable and rated for humans. It took around 10 years from the first Falcon 9 launch to the first crewed Falcon 9… I certainly hope that it goes faster for Starship.
We don’t actually need Starship to be man-rated, though. Use it to launch cargo, fuel, and unmanned vehicles, and then send astronauts up on a Falcon 9 (which is already routinely shuttling people to space) and have them transfer over in orbit.
We don’t even need Starship to be reusable for it to be cheaper than SLS. Though reusability is another whole order of magnitude or two of improvement.
Well, it must be for military use if DARPA is involved.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
As part of this initiative, NASA seeks to foster a lunar economy in which the space agency is not the sole customer.
Last year, the defense agency announced it was initiating a study, LunA-10, to understand how best to facilitate a thriving lunar economy by 2035.
In December, DARPA announced that it was working with 14 different companies under LunA-10, including major space players such as Northrop Grumman and SpaceX, as well as non-space firms such as Nokia.
These companies are assessing how services such as power and communications could be established on the Moon, and they’re due to provide a final report by June.
“Based on technical work and development conducted under the LunA-10 study, I have identified six hypotheses where, if revolutionary improvements in technology can be made, I assess that a direct acceleration to the fielding of a lunar economy is likely to occur,” Nayak said in the paper.
Last Thursday, based on the ideas elucidated in Nayak’s paper, DARPA issued a “Request for Information” for technological capabilities that could scale up lunar exploration and commerce.
The original article contains 544 words, the summary contains 179 words. Saved 67%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters DARPA (Defense) Advanced Research Projects Agency, DoD DoD US Department of Defense SLS Space Launch System heavy-lift
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