NASA's Astrolab mission is set to launch later this year, carrying four NASA payloads on its FLEX Lunar Innovation Platform (FLIP) rover. The mission is a collaboration between Astrolab and NASA, with the agency providing four payloads through non-reimbursable Space Act Agreements. These agreements allowed for faster negotiations and the inclusion of payloads that were ready to go and fit the bill in terms of the science that would be helpful for future missions.
One of the payloads is the Moon Exploration for Titanium with Active Lighting (METAL), a camera and radiometer designed to identify helium-3 deposits in lunar regolith. METAL is being developed in partnership with Interlune, a company that previously announced plans to fly a helium-3 prospecting payload on FLIP. The other payloads include a lunar retroreflector array from the Goddard Space Flight Center, a lunar dust level sensor and effects on surfaces (LDES) payload from the Johnson Space Center, and a lidar demonstration payload from the Marshall Space Flight Center.
Jaret Matthews, founder and CEO of Astrolab, said that the company reached out to individual NASA centers to see what payloads they had available for FLIP. The payloads are flying through non-reimbursable Space Act Agreements, with no money changing hands between NASA and Astrolab. This allowed for faster negotiations and the inclusion of payloads that were ready to go and fit the bill in terms of the science that would be helpful for future missions.
FLIP is now complete and will soon begin environmental testing, including shock, vibration, and thermal vacuum tests. Astrolab has previously done similar environmental testing on elements of the rover, giving the company confidence in the upcoming tests. Matthews said that Astrolab expects to complete the tests and have FLIP ready by the end of the summer for delivery to the launch site, where it will be integrated onto Griffin-1, the lander scheduled to launch late this year on a Falcon Heavy from the Kennedy Space Center.
While Astrolab has been getting FLIP ready for flight, the company has also been busy updating a proposed rover for NASA's Artemis lunar exploration campaign. Astrolab was one of three companies, alongside Intuitive Machines and Lunar Outpost, selected for NASA's Lunar Terrain Vehicle (LTV) program to develop a rover for future Artemis missions. However, at NASA's Ignition event in late March, the agency announced that it would not select any of the proposals submitted last year by the three companies, asking them instead to provide revised concepts for a smaller, simpler rover that could be ready as soon as 2028.
One of the major changes was that NASA was taking over responsibility for delivering the rovers to the moon, rather than allowing the companies to arrange their own delivery services. NASA put requirements on the mass and dimensions of the rovers so they could be flown on landers through the Commercial Lunar Payload Services contract. Matthews said that the company had to overhaul the design in quite short order to fit within the new bounding box, and that the design offered to NASA retains some of the hallmarks of its earlier concept.
NASA plans to make awards on May 22, and Matthews said that the company is well-suited to meet the schedule because it just did it with FLIP. However, he added that LTV will require all of the company's focus to hit the schedule, which is similar to the schedule for the lunar rover used on the final three Apollo lunar landings, but that rover was far less complex than the LTV.
Matthews said that he is personally energized by the changes that came out of Ignition, and that the company doesn't want to let NASA down. He said that the company will put its full focus on LTV and make it happen.
