Evolving Expectations for Commercial Lunar Landers
When Astrobotic released its second Peregrine lunar lander update, I believe many others had thoughts similar to mine:
Astrobotic’s Mission One was one of a new slew of NASA-funded commercial enterprises fixated on the Moon to provide lunar transportation and facilitate exploration. Expectations for the mission were high, especially after ULA’s Vulcan launch, which lifted off without a hiccup.
Instead, Peregrine’s “propulsion anomaly” made it a lunar lander that couldn’t land. The lander eventually traveled back to Earth, where it re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere and harmlessly disintegrated.
While the anomaly was mission-ending, it shouldn’t be surprising. Commercial startups conducting lunar activities is a relatively new concept, with corresponding inflated expectations. The Gartner Hype Cycle usefully illustrates where the commercial lunar exploration industry is within the cycle.
All companies working on lunar development, no matter the work they’ve accomplished and the grants they’ve been given, are at the beginning of the Hype Cycle, the Technology Trigger. The business they are entering is one dominated by governments.
The implication of the lunar lander's position on the cycle is that the landers that government agencies manufacture are expensive and unique. There’s no real incentive to reduce either aspect, one reason why Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) is unusual.
No lunar lander has yet successfully landed on the Moon under the CLPS program. Commercial lunar lander companies will have to travel through the Hype cycle to the Trough of Disillusionment and, finally, the Plateau of Productivity. Not all will make it through.
When those companies routinely launch and operate landers on the Moon, providing services to customers other than space agencies, they’ll have reached that Plateau.
Lunar Lander Landscape
Simultaneously, other companies and organizations have helpfully (if unintentionally) provided examples of how a lunar mission can fail, which should temper expectations.
One example is SpaceIL’s Beresheet lander, which didn’t land but crashed instead in 2019. The same year, India’s Vikram Moon lander also crashed. More recently, ispace’s Hakuto-R lander crashed into the Moon in 2023. A few months later, Russia’s Luna-25 joined the “expensive unintentional lunar impactors” crowd.
That’s not to say there haven’t been successes. The most recent success (January 2024) was the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s (JAXA) Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM), which landed on the Moon successfully, mostly. India finally landed a Vikram lander and deployed its Pragyaan rover successfully in September 2023. China’s Chang’e landers have also landed on the Moon; the latest, a 2020 sample return mission.
But maybe the fact that Moon landings still seem to be more in the realm of government endeavors and not commercial services is another indicator of just how immature commercial lunar landers are.
However, their aggregated history should provide some critical and necessary injections of reality into the business plans and expectations for those manufacturing and operating lunar landers. Because of the mixed results of previous Moon landing attempts, each startup should have a few “what if” plans, just in case.
Hopefully, they are transparent with their customers about the risks, too. None of this is easy. If it were, NASA and others wouldn’t be paying for commercial startups to do this, and people wouldn’t be getting as hyped up about these lunar missions.
In the meantime, Astrobotic, NASA, competitors, pundits, and investors all wait to discover what caused the propulsion anomaly. The company probably has a team (maybe even with some government help) going through all sorts of fishbone charts as they approach the anomaly’s root cause.
Once identified, a step or two (with associated warnings) will be added to the checklists of Astrobotic’s mission assurance types to keep that particular bugaboo away. But what Astrobotic and other startups are (hopefully) learning from the wayward Peregrine is that attention to detail matters. Identifying which and what detail to pay attention to will always be challenging. Or maybe the anomaly was just rotten luck—an entirely unanticipated chain of events that prevented Peregrine from achieving its mission goal.
Despite the failure, Astrobotic’s experience and history give it foundational reasons to have expected success with its lunar landers. The Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, company has been around for nearly 17 years. Founded in 2007, it accomplished much in building and deploying Peregrine. Astrobotic used several grants under Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) programs to conduct lunar research and demonstrate the viability of sample return missions and manufacturing building blocks on the Moon’s surface.
Astrobotic also won contracts through NASA’s various programs, such as Innovative Lunar Demonstrations Data, Tipping Point, and, of course, CLPS. A NASA CLPS contract award of $79.5 million resulted in Peregrine.
Astrobotic is also just one of quite a few companies looking to land and explore the Moon. After all, NASA had contracts to award, and if a company is already tackling something that fits the bill, then why not go after the contract?
Companies like Blue Origin, Firefly Aerospace, Intuitive Machines, and more are working on lunar landers. Lunar Outpost and Offworld are just a few of the companies providing lunar rovers. More companies are answering lunar challenges such as habitation, in-situ resource utilization, lunar navigation, and communications.
All are doing the work that NASA used to do, which means it is expensive, challenging, and risky but potentially rewarding. Unlike NASA, instead of deciding on one way of doing things, several companies are taking different paths to get vehicles on the Moon, which is the purpose of CLPS.
Those alternatives are why Astrobotic’s Peregrine failure is disappointing, but it’s also not the end of the world for lunar exploration. Other companies are ready or preparing to get their landers and rovers on the Moon.
Intuitive Machines plans to deploy its Nova-C lander in February 2024—the second mission for CLPS. It will be one of five more commercial lunar missions projected for 2024. Even Astrobotic has another lander, Griffin, that it expects to send to the Moon in late 2024. The lander has nearly five times the mass of Peregrine, making it the most massive CLPS lander that might be deployed in 2024.
Many of these companies have been doing their homework and working with NASA contracts and SBIR grants as steps to the Moon. Each commercial lunar lander company brings a slightly different spin to landing on the Moon and exploring it. In theory, those differences provide some flexibility for aiding NASA’s Moon plans.
Those lunar lander companies have customers relying on them to successfully transport their payloads on the lunar landers to the Moon (the “P” in CLPS). Astrobotic’s Peregrine lander hosted 21 payloads.
Some of Peregrine’s payload operators, such as NASA, German Aerospace Center (DLR), Mexican Space Agency (AEM), and the European Space Agency (ESA) weren’t surprising. They operate scientific payloads such as spectrometers, LIDAR, and radiation detectors installed on the lander.
However, Peregrine also carried a few unusual payloads, such as Bitcoin coins and plates, memorial ashes, libraries, and time capsules. Those were less about science and more focused on providing a service.
Setting Examples and Expectations
Although the company failed to land Peregrine on the Moon, there are several reasons why we should expect Astrobotic to be around past 2024. The first reason is the company’s demonstrated behavior after learning about its propulsion anomaly. The second was how transparent Astrobotic was in its communication updates and, even better, the timeliness with which the company provided them.
The Astrobotic team behaved professionally. It didn’t act as if the fact that it couldn’t land was a game-ender. Instead, Astrobotic did what it could to remain in control of the lander. Then, the company turned on customer payloads (those that it could) so that its customers could, at the very least, verify that their experimental payloads worked in space. That response shows character, resourcefulness, and professionalism in the Astrobotic team.
Customers and potential investors want to see that kind of character in a company they intend to work with. In this case, Astrobotic demonstrated that it would do what was reasonably possible for its customers. Their payloads wouldn’t be thrown away with the rest of Peregrine without activating them. Astrobotic didn’t shrug its shoulders and stop the mission, noting that “space is hard.” At the risk of invoking Chumbawamba’s earworm, the company was knocked down, but it got up again. And nothing kept it down for the rest of the mission.
Astrobotic’s mission updates were a breath of fresh transparency, too. Its first update was published almost as soon as the company discovered the problem: about 7.5 hours after launch. Astrobotic published its next update about an hour and a half later.
And it kept providing updates, some with photos from the lander’s cameras containing views of the Earth. Astrobotic sent about 22 updates in all, with the last update stating the company had confirmation of a safe reentry of Peregrine into the Earth’s atmosphere. Not all companies put that much effort into communicating effectively with the public.
Credit: Astrobotic Technology
A recent example of a lack of communication from a launch company occurred not too many weeks earlier. That company had launched a new rocket but didn’t provide an update until 12 hours after the initial launch announcement. Something was obviously wrong because most companies will report deployment, etc., as the launch progresses. No one was surprised when the company finally provided an update—an upper-stage malfunction deployed the satellite into the wrong orbit. But the company should have been more forthcoming.
This type of non-communication is common among space companies. It’s not clear why, other than fear of losing money. But this is a lunar lander hype cycle, remember?
Communicating effectively, especially if something goes wrong, helps the mission. Keeping people in the dark surrenders the company’s narrative to uncontrolled guesses, and those can be terrible. A company communicating in a timely manner, like Astrobotic did, can keep up public interest and excitement, especially if those updates have images.
The Pittsburg company is one of the few commercial companies to have gotten a lander into space. Based on the projected schedules of the other commercial lunar lander companies, more will be following the successful parts of Astrobotic’s effort: building a lander, integrating payloads into it, and getting that lander into space. Some will fail even those fundamental steps.
Others, however, should succeed past Astrobotic’s milestones and ultimately land on the Moon. Those odds are a reason why NASA implemented CLPS. Their successes will contribute to processes and technologies to make the Moon accessible to more lander companies, even as failures will inform competitors about what not to do.
There will be more failures, not because space is hard, but because these companies still have much to learn despite how far they’ve come. The other commercial lunar companies hopefully have failure contingency plans and exercises ready. They might even develop a communications strategy based on Astrobotic’s actions. All companies benefit from improved, effective communication.
Could Astrobotic have responded better? Undoubtedly. No company is perfect. But it did pretty well when Murphy punched the company in the gut. Maybe Astrobotic’s response to failure sets a standard for the minimum of how to respond to failure through providing effective communications.
Other commercial lunar-focused companies have hopefully taken note of Astrobotic’s responses. Their missions are exciting and give a glimpse of the future. People are curious if the companies have the technology and the talent to land on the Moon and explore it.
Astralytical's foundational strengths include curiosity and passion about the Moon and ways to explore it. At Astralytical, we are passionate about all developing and advancing lunar and cislunar activities. We have provided our clients with data and guidance to help them understand the state of commercial lunar exploration and make grounded decisions. This article is a very small peek at some of Astralytical’s work.
Commercial lunar activities are a relatively new business area, requiring businesses with a serious interest in it to become educated about it. Astralytical can help, as it is at the leading edge of that area’s market research.
John Holst is the Editor/Analyst of Ill-Defined Space, dedicated to analysis of activities, policies, and businesses in the space sector.
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