June 26, 2022: On Sunday, NASA announced a delay of at least one day for the launch of CAPSTONE to give more time to carry out the final checks of the systems. The article has been updated.
In the coming years, NASA will be busy on the moon.
A giant rocket will lift a capsule without astronauts on board around the moon and back, perhaps before the end of summer. A parade of robotic terrifiers will leave experiments on the Moon to gather heaps of scientific data, especially on water ice enclosed in the polar regions. In a few years, the astronauts will return, more than half a century since the last landing of Apollo on the moon.
All of them are 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, a spaceship called CAPSTONE will be launched as the first piece of Artemis to head to the moon. Compared to what will follow, it is modest in size and scope.
There will be no astronauts aboard the CAPSTONE. The spacecraft 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 conduct in the future for better benefit on interplanetary travel.
“NASA has gone to the moon before, but I’m not sure it’s ever been mounted like that,” said Bradley Cheetham, CEO and president of Advanced Space, the company that manages NASA’s mission.
The launch was scheduled for Monday, but on Sunday, the launch was delayed by at least a day to give more time to Rocket Lab, an American and New Zealand company that provides CAPSTONE’s trip into orbit, more time to perform the checks. end of the system.
“Teams are assessing the weather and other factors to determine the date of the next launch attempt,” NASA said in a blog post. “The next launch opportunity during the current period is June 28.”
The full name of the mission is Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Navigation and Technological Operations Experiment. He will act as an explorer of the lunar orbit where a manned space station will eventually be built as part of Artemis. This advanced site, called the Gateway, will serve as a transit 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 did not design or build CAPSTONE, nor will it exploit it. The agency doesn’t even have one. CAPSTONE is owned by Advanced Space, a 45-employee company on the outskirts of Denver.
The spacecraft is making a slow but efficient trajectory toward the Moon. There are daily launch opportunities until July 27th. If the spacecraft takes off then, regardless of the day it is launched, it will reach lunar orbit the same day: November 13th.
The CAPSTONE mission continues NASA’s efforts to collaborate in new ways with private companies in hopes of gaining additional capabilities at a lower cost more quickly.
“It’s another way for NASA to figure out what it needs to figure out and reduce the cost,” said Bill Nelson, NASA administrator.
Advance Space’s contract with NASA for CAPSTONE, signed in 2019, cost $ 20 million. Space travel for CAPSTONE is also small and cheap – just under $ 10 million for the Rocket Lab launch.
“It will be less than $ 30 million in less than three years,” said Christopher Baker, executive of NASA’s small spacecraft technology program. “Relatively fast and relatively low cost”.
Even Beresheet, a small effort by an Israeli nonprofit organization to land on the moon in 2019, cost $ 100 million.
“I see this as a finder of how we can help facilitate trade missions beyond Earth,” Baker said.
CAPSTONE’s main mission is to last six months, with the possibility of an additional year, Cheetham said.
The data it collects will help planners at the advanced lunar site known as the Gateway.
When President Donald J. Trump declared in 2017 that one of the top priorities of his administration’s space policy was to send astronauts back to the moon, the buzzwords at NASA were “reusable” and “sustainable”.
This led NASA to make a space station around the Moon a key piece of how astronauts would reach the lunar surface. Such a staging place would make it easier for them to reach different parts of the Moon.
The first Artemis landing mission, which is currently scheduled for 2025 but is likely to be delayed, will not use Gateway. But later missions will.
NASA decided that the best place to put this advanced site would be in what is known as an almost rectilinear halo orbit.
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 the two bodies helps make the orbit very stable, minimizing the amount of propellant needed to maintain a spacecraft orbiting the Moon.
Gravitational interactions also keep the orbit at an angle of about 90 degrees to the line of sight from Earth. (This is the almost rectilinear part of the name.) Thus, a spacecraft in this orbit never passes behind the Moon where communications would be cut off.
The orbit that Gateway will travel is about 2,200 miles from the moon’s north pole and extends up to 44,000 miles away as it passes over the south pole. A trip around the moon will take about a week.
As for the underlying mathematics, exotic trajectories are well understood as an almost rectilinear halo orbit. But this is also an orbit where no spacecraft has gone before.
So, CAPSTONE.
“We think we have it very, very well characterized,” said Dan Hartman, Gateway’s program director. “But with this particular CAPSTONE payload, we can help validate our models.”
In practice, without any satellite of the global positioning system around the Moon to identify precise locations, it may take a bit of trial and error to figure out the best way to keep the spacecraft in the desired orbit.
“The biggest uncertainty is knowing where you are,” Cheetham said. “You never in space know where you are. So you always have an estimate of where you’re with some uncertainty around.”
Like other NASA missions, CAPSTONE will triangulate an estimate of its position using signals from NASA’s deep space network of satellite dishes and, if necessary, return to the desired orbit just after passing the point. farther from the moon.
CAPSTONE will also try an alternative method to find your position. It is unlikely that anyone will spend the time and expense to build a GPS network around the Moon. But there are other spacecraft, including NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, that surround the Moon, and more are likely to arrive in the coming years. By communicating with each other, a fleet of spacecraft in disparate orbits could, in essence, set up an ad hoc GPS.
Advanced Space has been developing this technology for over seven years, and will now test the concept with CAPSTONE by sending back and forth signals with the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. “We’ll be able to determine where both spacecraft are over time,” Cheetham said.
When it began developing CAPSTONE, Advanced Space also decided to add a computer-scale atomic clock to the spacecraft and compare that time with that emitted from Earth. This data can also help identify the location of the spacecraft.
Because Advanced Space owns CAPSTONE, it had the flexibility to make that change without getting permission from NASA. And while the agency still works closely on such projects, this flexibility can be an advantage for both private companies like Advanced Space and NASA.
“Because we had a business contract with our vendors, when we needed to change something, we didn’t have to go through a major overhaul of government hiring officials,” Cheetham said. “That helped from a speed perspective.”
The other side is that because Advanced Space had negotiated a flat rate for the mission, the company was unable to go to NASA to request additional money (although it received additional payments due to chain delays). supply caused by the Covid-19 pandemic). NASA’s more traditional contracts known as “plus cost” reimburse companies for what they spend and then add a fee, received as a benefit, in addition to that, which gives them little incentive to keep costs under control.
“As things came up, we had to figure out how to deal with them very efficiently,” Cheetham 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 agency space shuttles. For SpaceX, NASA’s investments allowed it to attract non-NASA customers interested in launching payloads and private astronauts into orbit.
Until CAPSTONE, Advanced Space’s work was primarily theoretical: orbit analysis and writing software for its ad hoc GPS, not building and operating spacecraft.
The company is not yet really in the business of building spacecraft. “We bought the spaceship,” Mr. Cheetham. “I tell people that the only hardware we build here at Advanced is Legos. We have a great Lego collection.”
In the last two decades, small satellites known as CubeSats have proliferated, which has allowed more companies to quickly build spacecraft based on a standardized design in which each cube is 10 centimeters, or four inches in size. CAPSTONE is among the largest, with a volume of 12 cubes, but Advanced Space was able to buy it, almost off the shelf, at Tyvak Nano-Satellite Systems in Irvine, California.
This still required a lot of troubleshooting. For example, most CubeSats are in low Earth orbit, just a few hundred miles above the surface. The moon is nearly a quarter of a million miles away.
“No one has flown a CubeSat to the moon,” Mr ….