In the Yahoo Finance series NEXT, Yahoo Finance anchor Akiko Fujita travels to the headquarters of Astrobotic Technology in Pittsburgh, Penn., for a glimpse at the future and what it will take to colonize the moon. Astrobotic is on a mission to make history. More than five decades after the Apollo missions landed the first Americans on the moon, the Pittsburgh-based company is attempting to become the first commercial firm to successfully land an aircraft on the surface of the moon. That journey would mark the first step in a larger vision to develop the lunar surface’s infrastructure, in an effort to establish a more permanent human presence there. Astrobotic’s advancements point to a rapidly growing private space industry that is pushing space exploration to new heights. While government agencies like NASA have traditionally spearheaded space missions, the emergence of new upstarts have led to a surge in public-private partnerships focused on scientific research, driving a $470 billion industry. Astrobotic’s immediate focus is on delivering cargo to the moon. CEO John Thornton and his team are placing their first bet on the Peregrine lunar lander, a small-class spacecraft developed inside its 47,000-square-foot facility. Equipped with its electronics, propulsion, and communications systems, the Peregrine will be loaded aboard United Launch Alliance’s (ULA) Vulcan Centaur rocket, scheduled for launch later this year. NEXT is a groundbreaking series that will offer a glimpse into some of the biggest companies Yahoo Finance covers every day, what they’re planning for the future, and what it means for your investing portfolio. For more on our NEXT Series, click here, and tune in to Yahoo Finance every Monday at 10 a.m. ET. To watch the debut episode of NEXT: Samsung vs Apple: An inside look at the smartphone wars, click here.
JOHN THORNTON:Astrobotic's ambitions are driven by CEO John Thornton. His lifelong vision taking shape inside a clean room so secure, few outside the company are allowed in.That is the largest lander of any kind since Apollo, as you're seeing right there. It's going to deliver a 1,000-pound rover that NASA's building called Viper to the pole of the moon to drill for water.
But the next big challenge is when you go to the moon is you have to build a spacecraft that can fly for up to a month or more at a time through space, get out to the moon, drop into lunar orbit, and then descend for a soft landing down on the surface. No private group has so far been successful to land on the surface themselves. We hope to be the first.Success on that initial landing will pave the way for Astrobotic's next phase-- building out the moon's infrastructure.
So this is pretty similar to what we know as regolith, which is on the lunar surface. And it kind of feels like sand.One of the biggest issues on the moon is the dust. It's almost talcum powder-like sized. It's very sticky. It's very electrostatically charged. It sticks to stuff like static. And that can get on all kinds of things and cause all kinds of problems.
So the expectation is that you take this to the moon, you're going to get all the regolith in there, but you want to make sure that it's still transferring power.That's right because if you run out of power on the moon, that's game over. You don't get to go up there and plug it in or bring in extra batteries.To ensure reliable access to power, Astrobotic's also building out a portable grid that provides solar energy.
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