Two Colorado space companies are partnering on a mission to put a research lander on the far side of the moon in 2026 and send data back to Earth.
Denver-based iSpace USA Inc., a company making a lunar lander projected to launch in two years, hired Blue Canyon Technologies, a Lafayette-based subsidiary of defense giant RTX, also known as Raytheon (NYSE: RTX), to make the pair of communications microsatellites that will launch to the moon with iSpace’s Apex 1.0 lander and send large amounts of mission data to researchers.
The companies unveiled their partnership Tuesday at the Space Symposium, the large space and defense industry convention held in Colorado Springs.
The choice was a combination of BCT’s technical capabilities to make the satellites and the possibility of working in person with another Denver-area company on the project, said Ron Garan, CEO ofiSpace USA, the domestic subsidiary of Tokyo-based iSpace Inc.
“It was a perfect fit;’ said Garan, a former NASA astronaut. “They’ve got a really proven track record. They’re local. It’s a short drive to be able to collaborate, and in the power of face-to-face collaboration;’
iSpace USA started working on lander designs in Denver in 2020, establishing itself out of temporary space.
It has since moved its U.S. headquarters to offices near Centennial Airport and today employs more than 100 people.
The company hasn’t said how much is being invested in the Apex 1.0 mission.
NASA awarded the Draper project a Commercial Lunar Payload Services program grant of $73 million in 2022.
Last month, iSpace Inc., which is publicly traded in Japan, issued stock and raised $53.S million, the bulk of which the company says will fund Apex 1.0 lander development at its U.S. subsidiary.
BCT plans to build communications satellites that will ride to the moon with the lander but stay in orbit while Apex 1.0 is on the surface. The satellites will allow continuous data collection during the Apex 1.0 lander’s time on the far side of the moon, an area that today has no communications.
BCT will use its Venus satellite bodies and aims to provide near-continuous overhead connections for the lander.
“Being able to have that constant data flow back and forth at the moon, as opposed to small windows of time where you only get a little bit of data, is a really big deal;’ said Chris Winslett, general manager of BCT.
A successful Apex 1.0 mission should yield a lot of information that future lunar missions can use to establish a last presence on the moon, he said, which is the goal of NASA’s Artemis program.
“So, it’s very exciting for us to be a part of this mission;’ Winslett said.
BCT started in Boulder and was acquired in 2020 by RTX, then known as Raytheon Technologies Corp. It employs about 400 people locally between its Boulder cubesat and components production center and its Lafayette headquarters and satellite factory.
The Apex 1.0 mission is planned to last during a two-week lunar “day” on the far side of the moon but is not being designed to last through the dark and intense cold of the twoweek night, the company says.
iSpace’s Japanese parent company launched one lander to the moon a year ago which crashed on the surface, but it was considered a successful first mission. The company is sending another lander to the moon later this year.
The Draper lander iSpace USA is building is a different design, one that’s bigger and made in Denver.
It’s a roughly 10-foot-tall and 660-pound spacecraft iSpace is designing to carry NASA seismic measurement and soil temperature reading instruments, a robotic lunar rover made by iSpace in Luxembourg and other research payloads to the lunar surface.
The mission has attracted both commercial and government tenants who want space on the lander, the company says.
Apex 1.0 craft is targeting the Schrodinger Basin, the site of both an impact crater and a volcanic eruption on the moon that’s expected to have left behind evidence of the celestial body’s evolution.
The mission chose the region because so much about it is yet to be learned, and the far side of the moon – which isn’t always dark but never faces the Earth – hasn’t been the site of a U.S. lunar expedition, said Ryan Whitley, an iSpace vice president.
“There’s a first-mover advantage;’ he said. “There’s an incredible amount of scientific interest:’
The communications satellites that BCT is building for the mission aren’t the company’s first.
BCT built two communications satellites that circled Mars for two years starting at the end of 2018 and provided data links for NASA’s Insight lander on the surface. It was the first use in deep space of really small satellites, known as cubesats, and was a mission that has a lot in common with the iSpace Apex 1.0 project, BCT’s Winslett said.
The company also built components of eight cubesats that circled the moon. They were launched in 2022 with the test flight of NASA’s Orion capsule that lapped the moon.
By Greg Avery – Senior Reporter, Denver Business Journal, Apr 9, 2024