Hot on the heels of another productive test flight, two new lunar customers have been added to the flight manifest for SpaceX’s Starship.
Eagle landing
Lunar Outpost said on Thursday that SpaceX will deliver its first Lunar Terrain Vehicle, Eagle, to the Moon by 2029.
The Colorado-based company’s rover, the size of a heavy-duty truck, is being built under contract with NASA and recently finished a battery of human factors testing at Johnson Space Center.
“The main reason we went with SpaceX is the technological maturity and the pace at which they’re able to accomplish their objectives, especially after seeing flight five,” Lunar Outpost CEO Justin Cyrus said. “They’re going to do it in the timeline we need to be successful as a company.”
Sun rising
NASA also announced this week that Starship will deliver the pressurized rover that JAXA is developing for the Artemis program no earlier than FY 2032. That vehicle, being built by Toyota, will allow astronauts to rove the lunar regolith without wearing spacesuits.
What does an LTV delivery look like?
Starship is awfully big, and Moon landing variants we’ve seen so far propose lowering cargo to the surface on an elevator.
Cyrus wouldn’t share much detail on how his vehicle would actually exit Starship and, asked if the the agreement was a purchase of the entire vehicle, Cyrus wouldn’t comment, so it is likely other payloads will be on board.
“What I can say is, it fits,” Cyrus says. “Starship is pretty unique in the fact that it does have multiple configurations, and each one provides a unique value add to the ecosystem.”
This story originally appeared on Payload and is republished here with permission.
Chcete-li přidat komentář, přihlaste se
Ostatní příspěvky v této skupině

Rarely has Silicon Valley experienced a more profound period of transformation than it has in the past handful of years. The big VC boom of 2020–2021. The great VC hangover starting in 2022. The g

A YouTube executive needed only 27 minutes to make the case that the company is taking over all aspects of how people create and consume video online.
That was the length of a recent tal

Every time I read about another advance in AI technology, I feel like another figment

Racist AI-generated videos are going viral on

Scientists are tracking a large gas planet experiencing quite a quandary as it orbits extremely close to a young star – a predicament never previously observed.
This exoplanet, as

Journey with me back to the good old days, if you will. There was a time that, when you’d buy a gadget, it’d come with a sometimes verbose but often helpful “instruction manual.”
Not a q

After more than a week of threats, Elon Musk formally launched the America