These Three in 2023 →

(A Moon Race Update)

What a month, Moon fans!

Artemis 1, NASA's uncrewed test flight for returning humans to the Moon later on this decade, thundered off the launchpad in mid November after months of disappointing delays. Its Orion craft has already sent back some tantalizing pics from its lunar flyby.

Just before that, CAPSTONE, the tiny spacecraft blazing a trail for NASA's Gateway lunar outpost space station, arrived in its unique lunar orbit after a harrowing four-and-a-half-month journey from Earth.

And this week, on the final day of an incredible month, the commercial Moon race is set to kick off with the first of three privately funded lunar lander launches scheduled within months of each other.

HAKUTO-R, from Japanese space company ispace, inc., is scheduled to launch in the early morning hours this Wednesday, November 30, just a few months before the expected launches of landers from Pittsburgh's Astrobotic Technology and Houston's Intuitive Machines early next year. These three are vying to be the first company ever to soft-land a commercial spacecraft on the surface of the Moon. And, despite what is expected to be a huge head start for HAKUTO-R, it's shaping up to be a close finish.

Here's the breakdown. Nova-C from Intuitive Machines, scheduled to launch last of the three sometime in March 2023, will all-out sprint to the Moon, making the quarter-million mile or so trip in less than a week. Meanwhile, HAKUTO-R is expected to take several months to get there. And then there's Astrobotic's Peregrine, which is expected to launch sometime between the other two and with a travel time closer to that of Nova-C. Factor in launch delays that are common in the space industry along with time in lunar orbit preparing to land, and it is anyone's guess at this point which one of the three landers actually lands first. There's even a scenario where all three are ready to land on the Moon at roughly the same time.

Win, place or show, though, these three will all be part of history. Successful landings of three separate commercial lunar landers from three rival companies from two different countries would almost certainly crack the seal on the Moon economy. Everyone is rooting for everybody in this race. Let's look at the contenders in order of expected launch and celebrate these missions one by one.

HAKUTO-R

With launch delays commonplace, just getting into outer space is more than half the race. A successful launch this week puts HAKUTO-R in pole position for sure.

This one is truly an international effort. The HAKUTO-R Mission 1 (M1) vehicle, Japan's first private Moon lander, assembled and tested in Germany earlier this year, was delivered to Florida in late October for integration into one of U.S.-based SpaceX's Falcon 9 rockets. Once launched, ispace mission control in the heart of Tokyo will monitor HAKUTO-R throughout M1 using European Space Agency (ESA) ground stations across three continents.

"We believe Mission 1 will be the turning point in [commercial space exploration]. It goes without saying that the technical data and experience gained from Mission 1 are extremely important for future lunar missions around the world, including our [HAKUTO-R] Mission 2, to be more reliable," Takeshi Hakamada, Founder and CEO of ispace, inc., said in a statement over the summer.

Once in space, HAKUTO-R M1 will take three to five months to travel to the Moon due to its relatively small size and the need to balance fuel with payload capacity, Andrew Ames, Global Communications Specialist for ispace, inc., told Outerspaceland. Diagrams on the ispace website show the lander taking the fuel-saving scenic route, shooting well past the Moon in the first month after launch, then taking advantage of Earth's gravity to bring itself back around to an encounter with the Moon next spring. Orbital mechanics is a fascinating field.

The 30 kg capacity HAKUTO-R--landing on maybe the best-looking legs of the bunch, by the way, with Super Titanium parts provided by partner and watchmaker Citizen--will wind up at the Moon's Atlas Crater at the edge of the Sea of Cold (Mare Frigoris). Once on the ground, the lander will release two very special rovers. If successful, the 10 kg Rashid rover from United Arab Emirates (UAE) will be the first item deployed on the Moon from any Arab country. Packed next to Rashid will be a baseball-sized Transformers-style rover from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). That rover will take pictures and Moon measurements that could inform the design of a much larger future crewed Moon rover.

HAKUTO-R will not be delivering payloads to the Moon for NASA this go around (ispace's U.S. subsidiary is part of a team contracted by NASA to land payloads on the far side of the Moon by 2025), but M1 will be holding a package for pickup by the U.S. space agency. ispace and its European subsidiary, ispace EU, were awarded separate contracts to collect Moon dust for NASA under the same program as Colorado-based Lunar Outpost, which famously bid just $1 for its contract. ispace and ispace EU are charging NASA $5,000 per pile, which is still a bargain. The transaction is largely symbolic, meant to establish a legal precedent for space resource transactions.

ispace grew from the Japanese team that was a finalist for the $20 million Lunar X Prize in the 2010s. To pay tribute to its heritage, ispace announced HAKUTO-R M1 will carry as its final payload a special song called "SORATO" from Japanese rock band Sakanaction, who wrote the single in 2018 to celebrate Team HAKUTO.

The Lunar X Prize didn't produce a winner because time ran out, but the contest did spark some of the strongest commercial competitors in lunar landing today.

Peregrine

Fellow Lunar X Prize participant Astrobotic plans to launch its Peregrine Mission One (PM1) on the inaugural flight of the United Launch Alliance (ULA) Vulcan Centaur sometime in the first quarter of 2023. By my math, a launch in January or February would put Peregrine solidly in second place with plenty of time to overtake HAKUTO-R in cislunar space.

ULA will provide any launch updates, and Astrobotic will know its exact travel time once PM1 actually takes off, Alivia Chapla, Director of Marketing and Communications for Astrobotic said in an email to Outerspaceland. That said, Astrobotic expects it will take 15 days from launch for PM1 to reach lunar orbit and another about 15 days for Peregrine to land, she said.

That timeframe means Peregrine may, in fact, edge out the other two landers to land first. That said, Astrobotic CEO John Thornton has stressed in the past the importance of mission success over the glory of winning. It's a sentiment echoed by all the players in lunar landing that I've talked to so far.

"Obviously, it'd be great to be the first, but again, success is more important that [being] the first. And it's one of those things that if any of us succeed it's good for the industry," Thornton told Outerspaceland in 2020. "So, we really, really are rooting for each other on this one, because the market is so early and just getting going."

Astrobotic knows how to fill a manifest. The company's website highlighted 25 different payloads from seven different countries onboard a Peregrine lander that can deliver up to 120 kg to the Moon's surface, still targeting the Lake of Death (Lacus Mortis) on the Moon's upper east near side at last check. Chapla said the manifest for PM1 is closed.

NASA is the main customer for PM1. Eleven NASA Moon measurement devices are on its manifest as part of a Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) contract to deliver important science to support Moon exploration for the agency. Several will be searching for resources to mine like carbon dioxide and methane, with at least two designed to look for indications of water-ice near the lunar surface. Astrobotic has another, much more serious, water-hunting mission scheduled for later. Griffin Mission One will use a larger lander to deliver NASA's golf-cart-sized VIPER rover to the lunar South Pole no sooner than 2024.

There will also be several tribute and time capsule projects onboard PM1, including a Memory of Mankind On The Moon capsule from Puli Space Technologies out of Hungary, that country's first Moon payload, the ashes of customers of Moon memorial services companies, Elysium Space and Celestis, and an actual coin minted by BitMEX to hold exactly one bitcoin for ultra cold storage on the Moon.

Like HAKUTO-R, this Peregrine will also try to deploy a few Moon rovers, including Iris, a student-developed shoebox-sized rover from robotics powerhouse Carnegie Mellon University and the five micro-rovers of Colmena, a very unique lunar exploration project and the first-ever Moon mission from Mexico.

While it appears that the U.K.-based spider-legged rover designed to explore lunar lava-tubes originally planned for this mission (and highlighted in my first feature on Astrobotic) will not, in fact, be on this flight, Mexico's Colmena project seems just as wild. Colmena, Spanish for "beehive", will test a type of swarm technology for lunar exploration. After landing on the Moon, a small cylindrical "beehive" will pop its lid and catapult its five tiny autonomous "worker bee" robots 30 feet across the lunar landscape to coordinate and explore, according to a description in a recent Smithsonian Magazine article.

Lastly, in a bid to be the Moon's consumer package delivery service of the future, Astrobotic partnered with DHL out of Germany on a MoonBox service to demonstrate how standardized delivery to the Moon could be made available to the masses. It's like the flat-rate delivery we all know and love... only for Moon mementos. If it fits, it ships... as long as it's very small in this case (something like a wedding ring or an SD card). Chapla said 151 MoonBoxes will ship with PM1.

"Hopefully, in 10 years, lunar deliver is a regular, normal thing, and it would be a mark of success if it's not front page news," Thornton told Outerspaceland in 2020. "We want the news to be about the new ground-breaking exploration and the science and the development and the next steps of... how we will settle the stars."

Nova-C

If Peregrine is standard delivery, Intuitive Machines' Nova-C is express.

Once in space, Nova-C, carrying up to 130 kg, can reach the Moon in four and a half days and it could land on its surface as soon as six days after launch, Josh Marshall, Communications Director for Intuitive Machines, said in an email to Outerspaceland.

With that kind of blistering pace, it's impossible to count Nova-C out of any race for first place, even if it's due to launch last in this case.

Nova-C's inaugural mission (IM-1) could have launched sooner, but its latest delay was partly caused by a landing site change request from NASA. The agency asked for the change in order to be closer to where it plans to land humans with Artemis III, according to a recent Ars Technica article.

It underscores the importance of commercial landers to the Artemis program and, perhaps, the trust NASA places in its commercial partners to do very hard thigs. Nova-C, now scheduled to launch no earlier than March 2023 on a SpaceX Falcon 9, will aim for the more difficult to attain lunar South Pole on its very first landing attempt.

"Yeah, our mantra, by the way, is 'Stick the landing,'" Trent Martin, VP of Aerospace Services, told Outerspaceland back in 2020.

NASA has already entrusted Intuitive Machines with three CLPS delivery missions, all scheduled to launch within the next few years, including IM-1, which will carry five science payloads for the agency along with the six from commercial customers. Intuitive Machines will use its own Lunar Telemetry and Tracking Network (LTN) of ground stations spread across the globe to support all of its Moon missions, which was just brought online and is unique in the industry. Marshall told Outerspaceland the LTN will allow Intuitive Machines to prioritize its own missions and to track a spacecraft throughout a mission like IM-1.

IM-1 will be loaded with cameras facing in all directions. Four SCALPPS (Stereo Cameras for Lunar Plume Surface Studies) cameras will be mounted on the base of Nova-C looking down to study the dust kicked up by lunar landers for NASA. The lander will point a selfie-cam from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University at itself, hoping to snap the "first-ever third-person picture of a spacecraft making an extraterrestrial landing," according to the company's description of the project. And a camera from Hawaii's International Lunar Observatory Association will face up and out into the deep cosmos in order to capture the very first image of the center of the galaxy from the Moon as the first step to establishing a full lunar observatory at the lunar South Pole.

Much like the spider rover payload of Peregrine, it looks like one of the headline IM-1 packages highlighted in the 2020 Outerspaceland feature on Intuitive Machines won't be making the trip next spring. The remote controlled Moon racers, designed, in part, by renowned car designer Frank Stephenson, aren't on the manifest. However, NFT-backed Moon sculptures from renowned artist, Jeff Koons, described by Intuitive Machines as the "first authorized artworks to be placed on the surface of the Moon", will be onboard.

Finally, if HAKUTO-R has the best-looking Super Titanium landing legs, Nova-C will arguably have the best-looking cold-weather coat. Nova-C will be testing out Columbia Sportswear's NASA-inspired gold foil Omni-Heat Infinity technology to keep its bits warm at the lunar South Pole.

Tune In, Moon Fans!

One of the best parts about living in the internet era is the ability to easily follow along as history happens. Intuitive Machines has already announced comprehensive coverage of its launch and landing events, and spokespeople for both Astrobotic and ispace assured me broadcast plans are in the works.

Of course, any SpaceX launch is well covered on SpaceX's own YouTube channel, including ispace's imminent HAKUTO-R launch on Wednesday. And in the unlikely event ULA itself doesn't broadcast its first Vulcan launch, chances are space-fan channels like NASA Spaceflight and Everyday Astronaut will be all over the coverage.

If my back of napkin mathematics is correct, the competition for first commercial lander on the Moon could come to a head right around late March or early April. So, tune in and enjoy the madness of the coming months, Moon fans!

Updates (November 30, 2022):

- After this article was published, the launch of HAKUTO-R M1 was postponed until at least the morning of December 1, 2022. It's not the exclamation point right on the last day of November dramatized in this article, but this Fall overall has been great for Moon missions. And, hey, if November had 31 days... The launch date was updated to December 2022 from November 30, 2022 in the infographic attached to this article.
- There will be 151 MoonBoxes going to the Moon on PM1, not 28 as originally published in the article. The article was updated with the new number.
- The launch to landing of PM1 on the Moon is expected to be a total of about 30 days (about 15 days to orbit, plus about 15 days to land) not a total of about 45 days as originally published. The article was updated to show the right information.
- Memorial spaceflight company, Celestis, was also added to the article.

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