Nine U.S. companies now are eligible to bid on NASA delivery services to the lunar surface through Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) contracts, as one of the first steps toward long-term scientific study and human exploration of the Moon and eventually Mars. These companies will be able to bid on delivering science and technology payloads …Read More
Astrobotic has been competitively selected to be a delivery provider of NASA payloads to the Moon on the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) contract. Through CLPS, Astrobotic will be a 10-year provider of delivery services for NASA payloads to the Moon. The selection was announced today by NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine. As part of NASA’s …Read More
Lunar Outpost, a space technology startup developing enabling technologies for a sustained presence on the Lunar surface, announced their Lunar Prospector designed to search for and map the Moon’s natural resources. The first Prospector was demonstrated driving and drilling in Lunar regolith simulant at the Colorado School of Mines’ new Lunar testbed facility in the …Read More
Thorsten Denk’s paper Design and Test of a Concentrated Solar Powered Fluidized Bed Reactor for Ilmenite Reduction was presented at the 23rd Annual SolarPACES Conference in Chile. (Thorsten Denk – Presentation (pdf) Working over a ten year period at the Plataforma Solar de Almeria (CIEMAT) Denk has designed and built a device to make enough …Read More
The number of discovered near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) now tops 15,000, with an average of 30 new discoveries added each week. This milestone marks a 50 percent increase in the number of known NEAs since 2013, when discoveries reached 10,000 in August of that year. Surveys funded by NASA’s Near Earth Object (NEO) Observations Program (NEOs …Read More
NASA is gearing up to launch the United States’ first mission to sample an asteroid, with activities at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida beginning Tuesday, September 6, and culminating with the spacecraft launch Thursday, September 8. Various activities are open to media and will air live on NASA Television and the agency’s website. …Read More
Deep Space Industries has announced plans to fly the world’s first commercial interplanetary mining mission. Prospector-1 will fly to and rendezvous with a near-Earth asteroid, and investigate the object to determine its value as a source of space resources. This mission is an important step in the company’s overall plans to harvest and supply in-space …Read More
The Luxembourg Government, the public-law banking institution “Société Nationale de Crédit et d’Investissement” (SNCI) and U.S.-based aerospace technology company Planetary Resources have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) providing the framework for their cooperation within Luxembourg’s SpaceResources.lu initiative which aims at the exploration and commercial utilization of resources from Near Earth Objects (NEOs), such as …Read More
Can our moon help fuel an energy-hungry Earth? Work is in progress to build equipment that can demonstrate the extraction of helium-3 (3He)–helium with two protons and one neutron–and other volatiles from the moon’s resource-rich soil known as regolith. Volatiles are chemical elements and chemical compounds with low boiling points; the moon is a treasure-trove …Read More
Planetary Resources, Inc. announced on July 16 that its Arkyd 3 Reflight (A3R) spacecraft had successfully deployed from the International Space Station’s (ISS) Kibo airlock and began its 90-day mission. The demonstration vehicle will validate several core technologies including the avionics, control systems and software, which the company will incorporate into future spacecraft that will venture into the Solar System …Read More