Here's what has to happen if NASA wants to land on the Moon every month

Eight years in, CLPS is still in its “infancy,” said Brad Bailey, NASA’s assistant deputy associate administrator for exploration, during a recent lunar science workshop. Now, NASA is asking its lander providers, still learning to crawl, to rapidly learn to walk and run over the next two years. NASA has penciled in nine lunar landings for next year, followed by 10 in 2028. NASA and its commercial partners must pick up the pace to come anywhere close to that. Isaacman acknowledged this in a hearing last week before the Senate Appropriations Committee’s Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, and Science. “We have to do more than talk,” Isaacman said. “For a very long time across all of NASA, we’ve talked a really good game but then we kind of sit and wait for our vendors and partners to deliver outcomes, and as a result we tend to be late and it tends to cost more, so how do you change that?” One way, Isaacman said, is for NASA to offer more aid to the companies it is paying to develop Moon landers. “You start to embed subject matter experts across the supply chain to drive outcomes,” he said. “I don’t want to sit and watch on TV as a lander tips over,” Isaacman said. “I want a high batting average here, a high probability of success. I think the way you do that is you leverage a lot of the NASA expertise, incorporate it in the supply chain, and drive the outcomes that we’re looking for.” The framework for the CLPS program is similar to that of NASA’s Commercial Crew and Commercial Resupply Services programs, which partnered with industry to develop new crew and cargo vehicles to service the International Space Station after the retirement of the Space Shuttle fleet. But there’s a key difference. With the crew and cargo programs, NASA provided government funding and personnel to directly support development and testing before purchasing operational crew and cargo transportation missions through a separate contract. With CLPS, the agency largely skipped over this phase and went straight to buying lunar landing services. “We have very little experience operating on the Moon,” said Nujoud Merancy, NASA’s Moon base architect, in a meeting last week of the Lunar Surface Innovation Consortium (LSIC). “Humans have lived on the Moon for less than 13 days. We have one CLPS lander that landed successfully upright, [and] three that at least made soft landings. We don’t know very much. We do not know how these systems will operate. Nothing currently is surviving the night at the south pole.” This means NASA will need to take risks. The agency is still in an “exploratory phase,” Merancy continued. “How do we get these systems out there, test them, and learn from them? That means dissimilar systems because I don’t know which one’s going to work well.” “What we’re seeing in CLPS 1.0 is this potential for multi-mission block buys,” Seyffert said. “So we’re looking forward to seeing that in CLPS 2.0.” Blue Origin is a player in both the CLPS and Human Landing System programs, with a pathfinder cargo lander named Endurance set to fly to the Moon later this year. It will help pave the way for a crew lander for NASA’s use on future Artemis missions. “The development (of the cargo lander) is done,” Seyffert said. “We have great test data. We’re going to fly that later this year, and then we’re going to build to print dozens of landers to help NASA achieve its goals.” Astrobotic, which failed on its first mission to the Moon and is now manufacturing a larger lander for its second try, also supports the idea of block buys. “I’m really excited to now leverage a finished product and be able to utilize that over and over again,” said Dan Hendrickson, vice president of business development at Astrobotic. “One of the challenges, I think, that we faced is the bespoke nature, sometimes, of mission to mission. If we can try to maintain some of these vehicle types over and over again, I think we’ll reap the benefit of all of the blood, sweat, and tears that went into getting our supply chain to be able to perform and to overcome some technical challenges that were pretty significant.”