June 26, 2022: On Sunday, NASA announced a delay of at least one day in the launch of CAPSTONE to allow more time for final system inspections. The article has been updated.
In the coming years, NASA will be busy with the moon.
A giant rocket will land a capsule without astronauts on board around the moon and vice versa, perhaps before the end of summer. A parade of robotic landers will conduct experiments on the moon to gather piles of scientific data, especially on water ice trapped in the polar regions. In a few years, the astronauts must return there, more than half a century since Apollo’s last moon landing.
They are all part of NASA’s 21st century lunar program, named after Artemis, who in Greek mythology was Apollo’s twin sister.
As early as this week, the spacecraft named CAPSTONE should launch as the first piece of Artemis to head to the moon. Compared to what follows, it is modest in size and scope.
There will be no astronauts aboard CAPSTONE. The spaceship is too small, as big as a microwave oven. This robotic probe will not even land on the moon.
But in many ways it is different from any previous mission to the moon. It could serve as a template for public-private partnerships that NASA could undertake in the future to get a better explosion for its money on interplanetary travel.
“NASA has been to the moon before, but I’m not sure it was ever made that way,” said Bradley Chitham, CEO and president of Advanced Space, the company that runs NASA’s mission.
The launch was scheduled for Monday, but the launch was postponed by at least one day on Sunday to give Rocket Lab, a US-New Zealand company that provides CAPSTONE’s journey into orbit, more time to conduct final system inspections.
“Teams are estimating the time and other factors to determine the date of the next launch attempt,” NASA said in a blog post. “The next launch opportunity within the current period is June 28.”
The full name of the mission is Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment. He will act as a scout in lunar orbit, where a space station with a crew as part of Artemis will eventually be built. This outpost, called the Gateway, will serve as an intermediate station where future crews will stop before continuing to the lunar surface.
CAPSTONE is unusual for NASA in several ways. On the one hand, he is sitting on a launch pad not in Florida, but in New Zealand. Second, NASA has not designed or built CAPSTONE, nor will it operate it. The agency doesn’t even own it. CAPSTONE is owned by Advanced Space, a company with 45 employees on the outskirts of Denver.
The spacecraft takes a slow but effective trajectory to the moon, arriving on November 13. If time or a technical problem causes the missile to miss the moment of launch, there are additional chances by July 27. If the spacecraft descends from Earth by then, it will still reach lunar orbit on the same day: November 13.
The CAPSTONE mission continues NASA’s efforts to collaborate in new ways with private companies in the hope of gaining additional capabilities at a lower cost faster.
“This is another way for NASA to understand what it needs to understand and reduce costs,” said Bill Nelson, a NASA administrator.
Advance Space’s contract with NASA for CAPSTONE, signed in 2019, costs $ 20 million. Space travel for CAPSTONE is also small and cheap: just under $ 10 million to launch from the Rocket Lab.
“It will be less than $ 30 million in less than three years,” said Christopher Baker, program chief executive for NASA’s small spacecraft technology. “Relatively fast and relatively low price.”
Even Beresheet, an effort by an Israeli nonprofit to land on the moon in 2019, costs $ 100 million.
“I see this as a guide to how we can help facilitate extraterrestrial trade missions,” Mr Baker said.
CAPSTONE’s main mission is to last six months, with the possibility of an additional year, said Dr. Cheatham.
The data he collects will help the designers of the lunar post known as the Gateway.
When President Donald J. Trump announced in 2017 that the main priority for his administration’s space policy was to send astronauts back to the moon, and NASA’s buzzword was “reusable” and “sustainable.”
This prompted NASA to make a space station around the moon a key part of how astronauts will reach the lunar surface. Such a place would make it easier to reach different parts of the moon.
The first Artemis landing mission, currently scheduled for 2025 but likely to be postponed, will not use the Gateway. But the next missions will.
NASA has decided that the best place to place this outpost will be in what is known as an almost rectilinear orbit of the halo.
The orbits of the halo are those influenced by the gravity of two bodies – in this case the Earth and the Moon. The influence of both bodies helps to make the orbit very stable, minimizing the amount of fuel needed to keep a spacecraft orbiting the moon.
Gravitational interactions also maintain the orbit at an angle of about 90 degrees to the Earth’s view. (This is almost the rectilinear part of the name.) Thus, a spacecraft in this orbit never passes behind the Moon, where communications would be interrupted.
The orbit that the Gateway will travel comes within about 2,200 miles of the Moon’s North Pole and orbits 44,000 miles as it passes over the South Pole. A trip around the moon will take about a week.
From the point of view of basic mathematics, exotic trajectories as an almost rectilinear orbit of the halo are well understood. But it is also an orbit where no spacecraft has ever walked before.
So, CAPSTONE.
“We think we characterize it very, very well,” said Dan Hartman, Gateway’s program manager. “But with this particular CAPSTONE payload, we can help validate our models.”
In practice, without any satellites of a global positioning system around the moon to determine the exact locations, some trial and error may be needed to figure out how best to keep the spacecraft in the desired orbit.
“The biggest uncertainty is actually knowing where you are,” Dr. Chitham said. “In space, you never know where you are. So you always have an estimate of where it is with some uncertainty around it.
Like other NASA missions, CAPSTONE will triangulate its position estimate using signals from NASA’s deep-space radio antenna network and then, if necessary, push back to the desired orbit just after passing the farthest point. from the moon.
CAPSTONE will also test an alternative method to find your position. It is unlikely that anyone will spend the time and expense of building a GPS network around the moon. But there are other spacecraft, including NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, that orbit the moon and are likely to arrive in the coming years. By communicating with each other, a fleet of spacecraft in different orbits can essentially create an ad hoc GPS.
Advanced Space has been developing this technology for more than seven years and will now test the concept with CAPSTONE, sending signals back and forth with the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. “Over time, we will be able to determine the location of both spacecraft,” said Dr. Cheatham.
When development of CAPSTONE began, Advanced Space also decided to add an atomic clock with a computer chip to the spacecraft and compare that time to what is emitted from Earth. These data can also help pinpoint the location of the spacecraft.
Because Advanced Space owns CAPSTONE, it had the flexibility to make that change without permission from NASA. And while the agency is still working closely on such projects, this flexibility could be a boon for both private companies such as Advanced Space and NASA.
“Because we had a commercial contract with our suppliers, when we had to change something, we didn’t have to go through a big review of government contractors,” Dr. Cheatham said. “It helped in terms of speed.”
The downside is that because Advanced Space has negotiated a fixed mission fee, the company could not go to NASA to ask for extra money (although it received additional payments due to a supply chain delay caused by the Covid-19 pandemic). More traditional NASA contracts, known as “cost plus”, reimburse companies for what they spend, and then add a fee – earned as a profit – on top of what gives them little incentive to keep costs under control.
“When things came up, we had to figure out how to deal with them very effectively,” Dr. Cheatham said.
This is similar to NASA’s successful strategy of using fixed-price contracts with Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which now transports cargo and astronauts to and from the International Space Station at a much lower cost than the agency’s own space shuttles ever did. For SpaceX, NASA’s investment has allowed it to attract customers outside of NASA who are interested in launching payloads and private astronauts into orbit.
Until CAPSTONE, Advanced Space’s work was mostly theoretical – analyzing orbits and writing software for its ad hoc GPS – rather than building and operating spacecraft.
The company is not yet in the spacecraft business. “We bought the spaceship,” Dr. Cheatham said. “I tell people that the only hardware we build here at Advanced is Legos. We have a great Lego collection. ”
Over the past few decades, small satellites known as CubeSats have multiplied, allowing more companies to quickly build a spacecraft based on a standardized design in which each cube measures 10 centimeters or four inches. CAPSTONE is among the largest, with a volume of 12 cubic meters, but Advanced Space managed to buy it, almost ready, from Tyvak Nano-Satellite Systems from Irvine, California.
This still required a lot of problem solving. For example, most CubeSats are in low Earth orbit, just a few hundred miles above the surface. The moon is almost …
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