lunar mission Archives - The Enterprise Orbit

CubeRover sets up robotic rover shop in Luxembourg

CubeRover, the robotic rover company spun off from Astrobotic earlier this year, is opening up an office in Luxembourg. CubeRover offers a small-scale standardized planetary rover platform that the company hopes will revolutionize mobile robotic access on the Moon. The company was one of three recently announced to be opening business in Luxembourg. The new headquarters will act as a one-stop shop for its customers and as a hub for

Two commercial companies sign MOU for future space mining missions

Lunar payload services firm Moon Express has signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Deltion Innovations for collaboration on future lunar missions using in-situ resource utilization. The agreement is very likely the first such agreement between two commercial companies for future ISRU missions in space. “This is a very important milestone for Deltion,” CEO Dale Boucher said in a statement. “This is an opportunity to provide a more balanced suite

The new era of commercial lunar missions has arrived

NOTE: This story originally appeared in the Low Down, our free weekly ebrief. Subscribe for FREE to receive our take on the latest news, enabling tech and emerging markets in the commercial space sector each week. SpaceX’s announcement September 17 of its first passenger tourist for a flyby mission to the Moon marks an important step in the evolving commercial space sector. While there are plenty of unanswered questions around

Update: SpaceIL pushes lunar lander launch to early 2019

Israel-based SpaceIL has secured a ride to space. The organization, which designed a lunar lander as part of the Google Lunar XPRIZE, will ride as a secondary payload on a SpaceX Falcon 9 sometime in early 2019, according to rideshare logistics firm Spaceflight. Spaceflight announced last week it will begin offering rideshare services to geosynchronous transfer orbit (GTO) every 12-18 months, “or as customer demand requires.” The first such flight

Astrobotic’s lunar delivery service set to launch in 2020

Lunar logistics startup Astrobotic is hoping to become the world’s first lunar delivery service. The company, spun out of a project at Carnegie Mellon University, was launched about a decade ago in order to participate in the Google Lunar XPrize. “Our goal is to make the moon accessible to the world,” John Thornton, Astrobotic’s CEO, told The Downlink. “We are building a DHL delivery service to take payloads from all

New alliances emerge in the space race to the Moon

The Moon could get a little busy in the 2030s. The world’s biggest nations are all now working on developing lunar missions, thrusting the Moon once again to the center of a new global space race. Last week, US vice president Mike Pence reiterated the Trump administration’s desire to see American astronauts back on the Moon. “Here from this bridge to space our nation will return to the moon, and