/sci/ - Science & Math

>>15400582
Again google "Private companies are flocking to the Moon — what does that mean for science?"

>A raft of commercial lunar missions are taking off in 2023. The first lander is set to touch down this month, signalling a new era for Moon science and exploration.

> “A lot of people are looking at this optimistically, as the beginning of the furthering of expansion into space,” says Stephen Indyk, director of space systems at Honeybee Robotics in Greenbelt, Maryland, who chairs a commercial advisory board for a NASA lunar-science advisory committee.

> CLPS began in 2018, as NASA began focusing its human exploration programme on the Moon, and Zurbuchen was looking for a way to get more science out of that. His idea was to incentivize industry to build robotic Moon landers while NASA focused on getting humans back to the lunar surface. In this plan, NASA could pay companies to deliver science and exploration projects to the lunar surface, much as the agency does to send astronauts and cargo to the International Space Station. NASA began doling out contracts through the $2.6-billion CLPS programme, aiming to create a regular cadence of flights by small companies every year.

> But CLPS has been slower to get going than expected; when it announced the programme in 2018, NASA optimistically estimated that the first lunar payloads could fly the following year. Many companies struggled to develop the promised hardware, however; some have gone out of business. “My disappointment, frankly, was that it was not fast enough,” Zurbuchen says.

> Joe Landon, chief executive of Crescent Space, says his team has counted more than 100 proposed missions slated to go to the Moon over the next decade. Sparked in part by last November’s successful first flight in NASA’s Artemis human exploration programme to the Moon, he says, “we see this market developing”.