WASHINGTON – Masten Space Systems announced on August 26 that it has signed a contract with SpaceX for the launch of its first lunar mission with a suite charge for NASA.
Masten said SpaceX will launch its Masten Mission One, as MM1, lunar source mission in late 2022. The companies have not disclosed the value of the contract.
In an interview on August 27, Sean Mahoney, CEO of Masten, said that the contract does not have a specific launch vehicle, but rather a service to get the spacecraft to the moon on the company’s desired schedule. “We buy the performance we need,” he said. SpaceX will have the ability to place other spacecraft at launch based on non-interference.
The mission will charge NASA’s commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program under a $ 75.9 million contract to be awarded by the agency in April. The XL-1 lander will deliver nine scientific and technological demonstration loads to the moon’s south pole area.
The landing has passed a preliminary design inspection, Mahoney said, and the company is starting to buy long-lead items needed to build the spaceship. Masten also holds two-week meetings with teams representing the nine CLPS cargo.
NASA will be an anchor customer for the mission, but Masten intends to report others. “There’s a lot of interest,” he said, including from both the public and private sectors, although he did not name any specific potential customers.
Mahoney said the level of customer interest went up after Masten won the CLPS award and had a fixed schedule for the mission. “Once the CLPS award was created and we switched from speculative to having a schedule, the tenor and tone of our talks changed dramatically.”
The limiting factor for the landing mission has not been the amount of mass available for cargo, he said, but instead positions on the landing that have views over the surface desired by cargo. “There’s a game of positioning among the various instruments so they can get the viewing angles they need and not interfere,” he said.
However, he said the company is not considering any major changes in the lander’s design to meet cargo requirements. “The design principle is the ‘pick-up truck’ that can pick up a lot of different things,” he said. “We try to escape the completely unique, customized system that does one job and one mission really well.”
Masten joins a growing list of companies and organizations using SpaceX to launch lunar lander missions. Intuitive Machines, which won one of the first NASA CLPS awards last year, selected SpaceX to launch its IM-1 lunar mission on a Falcon 9 in 2021. Intuitive Machines said at the time that it would be part of a rideshare mission, but did not state if his landing would be considered the primary charge or not.
Japanese company ispace selected SpaceX in 2018 to launch its first two lunar missions, which at the time were an orbiter and lander that launched on Falcon 9 rockets in 2020 and 2021, respectively. The company now says both land missions will be, starting in 2022 and 2023.
SpaceX has already launched one mission. Beresheet, the lunar lander built by Israel Aerospace Industries for Israeli organization SpaceIL, flew as a secondary cargo at the launch of SpaceX Falcon 9 from an Indonesian communications satellite in February 2019. Beresheet used its propulsion on board to move from a geostationary orbit to a lunar orbit , but crashed attempting a landing in April 2019.
Astrobotic, which won a CLPS award last year for its Peregrine lunar lander, selected United Launch Alliance to launch that mission on the first flight of ULA’s Vulcan Centaur rocket in 2021. Astrobotic previously had a contract with ULA to launch Peregrine launch as a secondary charge on an Atlas 5 before winning the CLPS award.
Astrobotic won a second CLPS award on June 11 when NASA selected the company to deliver its Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) mission to the lunar South Pole in late 2023. Astrobotic said at the time that it would later select a launch vehicle. for the VIPER mission this year.
