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NASA has big plans to return humans to the Moon. Gary Hershorn / Getty Images
When it comes to space missions, every ounce counts. The less fuel a spacecraft requires, the more cargo it can carry and the more work it can do. Recently, NASA discovered a special path to the moon that would allow small unmanned spacecraft to reach our closest space neighbor relatively quickly with very little fuel.
The method, which received a patent in June, involves sharing a journey with communication satellites to reach high Earth orbit and then harnessing the gravity of Earth and the moon to launch to the moon.
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The first spacecraft to use this trajectory will be the Pathfinder Dark Ages Polarimeter (Dapper), a mission developed by the University of Colorado Boulder tasked with recording low-frequency radio waves from the opposite side of the moon for the first time.
Backed by a small $ 150 million budget from NASA’s Explorers program, the team behind Dapper was pressed to find a low-cost way to get the probe to the moon and get as much scientific research as possible.
“This path to the moon came out of necessity, as these things often happen,” Jack Burns, an astrophysicist at the University of Colorado Boulder and leader of the Dapper mission, told Business Insider. “We needed to keep launch costs low and find a cheap way to get to the moon.”
Illustration of NASA’s proprietary path to the moon’s orbit. POT
The Dapper spacecraft itself is about the size of a microwave, which is small enough to piggyback on a communications satellite mission and reach high Earth orbit. Beyond that point, you can fly the rest of the way on a small tank of fuel with the help of gravity from Earth and the moon to accelerate and decelerate at the right time.
NASA estimates that the one-way flight will take about two and a half months. Similar-sized missions on a different trajectory typically take up to six months.
Of course, NASA has done it much faster with much larger missions in the past. In 1968, it took the space agency just a few days to land three astronauts on the moon in a near-direct shot. But that method was extremely expensive and required a large rocket.
NASA has big plans to return humans to the moon. The agency’s Artemis program aims to get American astronauts to the moon by 2024 and establish a long-term base there by 2028.
Last week, Jeff Bezos’ private space company Blue Origin delivered an engineering mockup of its lunar lander to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. The lander is one of the three key parts of the Artemis program. The other two are the SLS (Space Launch System) rocket and a lunar getaway, which is basically a small space station.
Blue Origin said the mockup is not the final version of the lunar lander, but a design proposal to get feedback from Artemis astronauts.
