New Lunar Rovers, and Progress on Space Junk Cleanup

Happy Tuesday, everyone! This week’s newsletter is 830 words, a 6-minute read.

Table of Contents

• 1 Big Thing: NASA is Narrowing Down Companies to B …

• 2. Cool Stuff You Might Have Missed

• 3. Astroscale’s Space Junk Cleanup Mission is Goin …

• 4. A Personal Book Recommendation

• 5. Upcoming Launches & Missions

1 Big Thing: NASA is Narrowing Down Companies to Build its Lunar Rover

NASA is hard at work on its Artemis program, which will send astronauts around the moon in a late 2025 mission and land them on the moon in a mission a year later.

A Crucial Part of NASA’s Mission, once astronauts arrive at the moon, will be moving them around the moon’s dusty, rocky surface.

Driving us Crazy: To quickly traverse the moon’s surface for sample collection and exploration missions, astronauts will rely on lunar rovers built by private companies in partnership and collaboration with NASA.

Getting Picky: Last week, NASA selected 3 companies’ proposals to continue to develop the next generation of lunar rovers for the Artemis moon missions.

Familiar Face: The 3 companies selected by NASA for its Lunar Terrain Vehicle (LTV) Services program are Intuitive Machines, Lunar Outpost, and Venturi Astrolab. Intuitive Machines has been in the news (and this newsletter) a lot lately because it recently became the first private company to successfully land on the moon.

Big Awards: NASA decided to award contracts to all 3 of these companies, each coming in with bids between $1.7 billion and $1.9 billion. NASA has already said that they don’t expect Astrolab to come through, but we’ll have to wait and see.

Looking Ahead: As soon as prototype rover photos come out, you already know I’ll be sending them out in a newsletter. I’m so excited for any Artemis program news.

2. Cool Stuff You Might Have Missed

1. Elon Musk says Starship will be 500 feet tall for Mars missions. (Space)

2. United Launch Alliance launched its last Delta 4 heavy rocket, marking the end of an important era in spaceflight. (CBS)

3. A British astronomy project has been awarded almost $4 million to develop a telescope that can see stars exploding and black holes merging. (BBC)

3. Astroscale’s Space Junk Cleanup Mission is Going to Plan (so far)

Back in February, I wrote about space company Astroscale launching a precursor to a spacecraft that claims to be able to clean up junk in space.

Ambitious Goals: Astroscale launched its February ADRAS-J mission with the goal of inspecting a piece of space junk in orbit around Earth.

Setting Up for the Future: Astroscale planned to inspect the piece of debris and practice rendezvousing with it in order to learn valuable information for future missions in which spacecraft will actually remove the debris from orbit.

How Did it Go?: Astroscale announced on Thursday (Apr. 11) that its spacecraft had moved within a few hundred miles of the space junk and that it switched from ground-based navigation and control to navigation and control using its onboard cameras and sensors.

Slow and Steady: Over the course of the next month, Astroscale’s spacecraft will slowly and carefully approach the space debris until the two are only separated by a few dozen feet. The company will use what it learns from this mission to send a second mission up that will remove the debris from orbit altogether.

Not Just Trash Day: I’ve definitely written about this already, but cleaning up space junk is going to become serious business soon. Popular orbital trajectories around Earth are littered with debris from missions past - debris which is traveling around the Earth at tens of thousands of miles an hour, posing a ridiculously dangerous threat to any spacecraft flying in its path.

4. A Personal Book Recommendation

We’ve probably all heard the story of the race to the moon between the Soviet Union and the United States in the 1960s. What we haven’t heard nearly as much about is the race to manned spaceflight itself - especially from the Soviet Union’s perspective.

In his book “Beyond”, Stephen Walker tells the story of Soviet Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin and the mission that made him the first human being in space. The book has crazy high ratings and reads like a piece of well-written fiction, except it actually happened.

You can check it out here:

5. Upcoming Launches & Missions

Don’t Forget: If you refer 5 friends to the newsletter, I’ll send you a free copy of Neil deGrasse Tyson’s A Brief Welcome to the Universe. Use the link below to share and get credit for your referrals!

Thanks as always,

-Michael