Earth, Moon and Mars. Lunar Outpost Is Doing All The Things.

The "NewSpace" trifecta. A single company up and running on three different worlds. No matter how tiny the toehold, it seems like that should be a pretty significant moment for a space startup of this era. Like one of those defining moments that ultimately leads to humanity's complete dominion over the entire solar system. Kind of like in Amazon's The Expanse, but without any of the magical blue goo and messy interplanetary wars and sub-standard writing of Season 4. We hope.

It would be a major milestone for any company of any size to be involved in any capacity in different operations on the Moon, Earth and Mars all at the same time. Therefore, we had to connect again. The very real potential for that to happen for Lunar Outpost in the not-too-far-off future absolutely had to come up in a catch-up interview with Julian Cyrus, chief operating officer, after the company he helped found, named for the Moon I reminded him, went ahead anyway and bought into the celebrated Perseverance mission that just landed on Mars, of all places. Bold move.

This, after making headlines by promising to scoop and sell Moon dust to NASA for $1. That after quietly building out some networks of smog-sensing Canaries on Earth to help fund all of the wild space stuff. All of it before either Julian Cyrus or his chief executive and co-founding brother, Justin, turned 30. It's a lot to talk about at one's 10-year high school reunion. And the remote-controlled racing Moon dune buggies haven't even come up yet.

"We've had just so many things going on that... the big picture stuff sometimes does get lost," Cyrus said. "And so, when you bring it back and say, Yeah, you're gonna be operational on three different rocks, that's pretty cool to hear."

The Moon. MAPPs And More

Hold the champagne, but definitely put it on ice. The three-feat won't be complete without a Moon mission as the capper. You see the irony. Cyrus assured Outerspaceland via Zoom in both January and March that Lunar Outpost will almost certainly live up to its name. Moon stuff is on the verge of happening.

"2023 is very doable for us. We're gonna be ready far before that. We're hoping it's gonna be more like a 2022 mission," Cyrus said in January. "MAPP, right now, is undergoing testing for spaceflight qualification. So, this year, it'll be ready to go."

All MAPP really needs after that is a ride.

Cooly passing on the chance to break news on a lesser-known space site in the outer reaches of cyberspace, Cyrus did confirm in our follow-up March conversation that a deal with a lunar lander company to put the Lunar Outpost prospecting rover on the Moon is close to done. He said, "Basically, [the deal is] in contracting phase right now. [It's] anyone's best guess when that will officially be announced."

MAPP Prospectors

MAPP stands for Mobile Autonomous Prospecting Platform. The key word, here, is 'Autonomous'. Cyrus said autonomy is one of the things that sets a MAPP prospector apart from rovers of the past.

There will be a human tele-operation component to MAPP, maybe even using a gaming controller. The Xbox variety tends to feel right for people, he said. But MAPP will also be armed with artificial intelligence to help it make its own on-the-fly decisions.

"Instead of a team of people planning out each and every step of one rover, we want to have one person just watching a team of rovers, so you maximize the efficiency," Cyrus said.

"If you wanna throw a buzz word in there, you can throw in 'swarm' robotics," he said. "Obviously, these first missions will incorporate probably just one rover, but we're making them swarm capable right now."

MAPP is designed to be "industry leading" in payload-to-mass ratio, according to a description on Lunar Outpost's website, which should help drive the price down for its payload customers. Cost is an important differentiator, Cyrus said.

MAPP will also be highly flexible. "[We] want it to be as flexible as possible. So, we'd have a lot of different configurations as well as payload volume dimensions that can incorporate taller or more power-hungry payloads," Cyrus said.

And MAPP can handle the elements, he said. "[We] do have the ability to add, we call it COLD-MAPP, a package that allows even the MAPP rover to survive the lunar night, which is pretty intense."

Lunar Outpost plans to have a wide selection of MAPP prospectors for its lunar payload customers to choose from. The Tonka-truck-sized 10kg MAPP 2.0 is currently testing for spaceflight. A heavy-duty go-cart-sized 300kg-class HL-MAPP will be able to carry cargo "vast distances on the lunar surface," according to Lunar Outpost's website. And a mini RC-racecar-sized 2.5kg-class MAPP is in the works for customers with really tiny payloads, Cyrus said. There are also terrestrial MAPP Earth rovers that the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) may have its eyes on. "[We've] got some DOD contracts that I'm not sure how public they want us to be yet with some of those things, but we've got some other DOD applications," Cyrus said.

Whether it's overland delivery of payloads, helping to build infrastructure, searching for resources, or extracting resources, there should be plenty for MAPP prospectors and other rovers to do on a bustling Moon, Cyrus said. Once people start extracting resources, that alone is "gonna go on for decades on the Moon."

$1 Moon Dust

One of the MAPP prospector's first jobs when it arrives on the lunar surface will be to set the economic tone for all future human activity on the Moon, bagging some Moon material (anything will do, really) and participating in a first-of-its-kind space swap. NASA wants Lunar Outpost to scoop up a sample of Moon dust for the agency to come collect, Craigslist-style.

Got the money. Working on a ride. Will text when we get there. ~NASA

It's not entirely clear what NASA would use the Moon sample for, or if it would ever actually physically take possession of it. NASA is only requiring photos and location data of the sample before payment is made. The project isn't really about Moon dust, though. It's about setting the legal precedent for space resource transactions between NASA and the private sector in order to begin building the framework for the extraterrestrial economy that the agency believes is critical to sustaining human settlements in space. NASA hopes a deal happens by the time the first Artemis astronauts arrive on the Moon, which is very tentatively slated for 2024.

Lunar Outpost was one of four companies to earn NASA contracts for this project. Masten Space Systems, iSpace Japan and iSpace Europe are the others. True to bold form, Lunar Outpost looks like the only one without its own lunar lander to use to get down to the surface of the Moon to complete the project. It's also the company that got the most press for only charging $1 for its sample.

$1, huh? Was that just a savvy marketing for extra attention? It may appear that way, but not really, Cyrus said.

NASA was willing to pay $15,000-$25,000 for each Moon sample, according to this Verge article announcing the call for bids, which seems like a lot of money. But, as the article rightly pointed out, $25,000 doesn't quite cover the multi-million-dollar one-way bus-fare to the Moon. And this particular NASA contract didn't include a ride-share there.

The amount of money NASA offered wasn't going to make a dent in paying for a Moon mission, Cyrus said. So, using Price Is Right Contestants Row best practices, Lunar Outpost underbid everybody.

"We realized that it really wasn't about the money, and so, we just put in the symbolic $1 bid. And I guess that was the right thing to do, because it kind of took off," Cyrus said. "But, for that, we did want to show NASA that, Hey, we're serious in terms of we wanna be a part of this. We want to be at the table when you're creating this framework [for a space economy]... So, that's kind of some of the other aspects other than just, This is gonna be really cool and generate a lot of buzz for us."

Moon Racers

But it may not even be a MAPP prospector that reaches the Moon first for Lunar Outpost. It could be yet another buzz-worthy project, instead, that checks the box. In 2020, Lunar Outpost agreed to help build a pair of racers for entertainment and education company Moon Mark's "first-ever race on the Moon", the grand finale of a high school competition to help promote STEAM education worldwide. The racers are expected to launch later this year as part of partner Intuitive Machines' IM-1 Moon mission. If the schedule holds, Lunar Outpost's Moon racers would handily beat any MAPP prospector to the surface of the Moon.

A mini version of the MAPP rover will be used as a starting point for the Moon racers, but they will be customized for racing, Cyrus said. Lunar Outpost will do all of the "hard engineering" with high school students from the two finalist teams providing "genuine input" into the designs of their racers, he said. The high schoolers should be quite capable of helping out. According to an article in the April issue of The Red Bulletin, the two finalist teams, one from China and the other from Argentina, impressed judges with concepts that "met or exceeded the technical requirements to race on the Moon's surface."

But would a high school Moon race count as a real Moon mission for Lunar Outpost?

"Oh, absolutely! I know from a scientific standpoint, it wouldn't be fully loaded... But, you think about how many man-made objects have actually been on the Moon. Anything that is put on the Moon, it's a huge accomplishment," Cyrus said.

Okay. Sorry. Wrong question. How fast will these go?

Well, there's a weight limit, so that limits the amount of power you can pack in. There's a limit to how big the wheels can be too, Cyrus said. Plus..."You're not just driving on a paved road. You're driving in just a sea of this loose dirt and rocks. It's also at one-sixth gravity, so... you're gonna have a pretty wild ride. But, not sure how fast it's gonna go. We're gonna try to make them go as fast as possible."

Mars. Mars?!

It is Perseverance, not MAPP, that has the top spot on the Lunar Outpost website landing page right now. And why not? The car-sized NASA rover is already a star. It just landed on the Red Planet and it has important business there; business that now includes Lunar Outpost.

Perseverance's main mission is to search for signs that life once existed on Mars. But it's also carrying a little $50 million golden box designed to make breathable air, so maybe we all can live there someday. The Mars Oxygen In Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) Experiment (MOXIE) is designed to breathe kind of like a tree does, sucking in a small portion of the carbon dioxide that makes up the vast majority of the thin Martian atmosphere and blowing out the oxygen that humans tend to prefer. It's a small test to see if it's even possible to efficiently make high quality oxygen out of Martian air for rocket fuel and for future astronauts to breathe.

Lunar Outpost announced in late February that it had acquired Massachusetts-based Destiny Space Systems, a company already involved with the MOXIE project. Destiny Space Systems helped calibrate MOXIE, contributed to MOXIE experiment simulations, helped design the parameters for MOXIE's first operations on Mars, and will help "prepare MOXIE commands to send to Perseverance" and "support future experiment planning and design," according to the Lunar Outpost press release.

Perseverance is still getting settled in on the Marian surface, photographing beautiful panoramas and testing its hardware. Science like MOXIE isn't expected to start until the 60th day of Perseverance's mission, or late-April, at the earliest. After that, MOXIE is expected to run experiments about once every few months, with Lunar Outpost now providing ongoing support.

The Destiny Space Systems deal may be confusing for people wondering why a Moon rover company is occupying Mars, but Cyrus broke it down so it made sense. One, the acquisition brings with it a ready-made track record with NASA on a major project. Two, Dr. Forrest Meyen, founder of Destiny Space Systems, joined the team at Lunar Outpost as its chief strategy officer as part of the deal, bringing on his years of experience with space hardware for chemical processing, useful knowledge for ISRU projects everywhere. Three, any experience Lunar Outpost can get on projects like MOXIE at the bleeding edge of ISRU, or living off the land, in outer space is key to realizing the company's grand vision of helping to establish space settlements, Cyrus said.

The Destiny Space Systems acquisition only helps Lunar Outpost broaden its capabilities all along the space resources value chain, from prospecting raw materials to actually making consumables in space.

"What we see right now, the first stage is... providing mobility services to payloads. The next is helping to establish infrastructure for more robust operations," Cyrus said. "And after the infrastructure's laid, then you can start doing those resource activities, and doing the extraction, the refinement, refueling, and then do those at scale to where they're not just tech demonstrations, but they're making a sizable economic difference."

So, Lunar Outpost will become the #1 oxygen supplier on Mars?

Before pointing out that NASA would own all of the air from MOXIE, insofar as air can be owned, Cyrus laughed and said, "There's not many oxygen suppliers on Mars, right now, huh? Yeah, you know, we'll see who's in the running soon. Hopefully we will be."

Earth. Don't Forget The 3rd Rock.

The argument goes something like, Why worry about surviving on another world? Let's just take care of ours.

The rebuttal is embedded right in the mission statement of companies like Lunar Outpost.

"As our overall mission, what we tell people is, that we want to create technology that enables an extended presence on the Moon, and do so while bringing some of those technologies back to Earth to have a positive impact," Cyrus said.

Thanks to its lofty space ambitions, Lunar Outpost now has networks of its smog-sensing Canary boxes in 15 different states here on Earth. Cities tend to use them to track auto emissions around town. Oil companies can use them for climate compliance. State and federal agencies might use them to measure airborne ash from wildfires. Combined with realtime meteorological data, organizations can get a complete picture of where pollutants are coming from and where they are headed, Cyrus said.

Canary came from Lunar Outpost's early work to measure Moon dust that could contaminate Moon habitats. Moon dust, or regolith, is nasty stuff. It is extremely bad for the health of astronauts and their equipment. It is also everywhere on the Moon, so it would be an ongoing battle to keep it under control in any livable space orbiting the Moon or on its surface. Lunar Outpost developed a system for measuring the level of Moon dust in a Moon habitat using a distributed network of sensors that talk with each other, Cyrus said. "If you have a distributed network of sensors, then you can get more resolution into the hyperlocal environment of wherever you're monitoring."

It was a system that could be easily modified to work here on Earth, Cyrus said. So, when the City of Denver in Lunar Outpost's home state of Colorado put out a request for pollution solutions, Lunar Outpost answered the call, and its environmental business took off from there. In fact, the Earth-focused environmental services arm has become so successful that Lunar Outpost recently decided to package it into a subsidiary called Outpost Environmental.

Of course, Canary is just one of countless examples of how ideas originally developed for outer space can dramatically enhance life here on Earth, causing space nerds like me to proudly proclaim like we had something to do with it, You know that camera phone in your hand? NASA. Ever heard of the Dustbuster?...

"When you think about a lot of the expansions in technology and human action, a lot of it comes from when a new frontier's opened up... And now you have space, which is the final frontier, the ultimate frontier, and the vast amount of opportunity and things that can be accomplished," Cyrus said.

The Yes Business

"Back in 2017, Justin and I saw an opportunity in what was becoming kind of the NewSpace industry. We saw that there was gonna be a shift back to the Moon. That there was a focus there as a place for a launchpad for going to Mars, for going to those other places in the solar system, as well as providing for cislunar infrastructure and refueling satellites and things of that nature," Cyrus said.

Rockets are sexy, but spending hundreds of millions of dollars to get crushed by SpaceX seemed like a lot to deal with. The Moon lander market was already getting a little crowded, he said. So, the Cyrus brothers decided to start a company that makes Moon rovers to deliver last-mile payloads on the surface of the Moon, scour its landscape for valuable resources and help build the infrastructure to support a thriving Moon economy.

"We had a small angel investor in the beginning, and I'll say small, and then, we put in some of our own money. And then, after that, it's been all bootstrapped," Cyrus said. It's a situation that has given Lunar Outpost the luxury of saying yes to a lot of different things, if not all the things.

"Since we are small and we can make decisions on our own and we are flexible, we're trying to take advantage of the opportunities that we have in front of us as they come along," Cyrus said.

One yes led to another, and now a company called Lunar Outpost, four years old this year, has a presence on Mars and a booming business on Earth to go along with promising Moon adventures just over the horizon. The NewSpace trifecta is within reach.

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