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PITTSBURGH — Astrobotic showed off the lunar lander it plans to launch later this year that will be the vanguard of NASA’s new lunar base ambitions.
At a June 15 event at its headquarters, the company revealed its Griffin-1 lander. The company is completing final work on the lander before shipping it to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California for environmental tests in the next few weeks.
After those tests are complete, Griffin will return to Astrobotic for final integration work before shipping to Florida for launch preparations. The lander is projected to launch in the fourth quarter of this year on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket.
Griffin will deliver 10 payloads from six nations to the moon, led by the FLEX Lunar Innovation Platform (FLIP) robotic rover from Astrolab. The 500-kilogram rover will be the heaviest commercial payload landed on the moon to date.
“This is the first infrastructure-class lander going to the surface of the moon,” said John Thornton, chief executive of Astrobotic, at a press conference, citing its ability in the future to deliver power systems and other equipment. “This lander will be part of the cornerstone of building up the moon base.”
Griffin-1 is Astrobotic’s second lunar lander mission. The company’s first mission, Peregrine, launched in January 2024 but suffered a propulsion malfunction hours after launch that prevented it from attempting a lunar landing.
“We learned a lot” from Peregrine, Thornton said. The company was able to operate the lander in cislunar space for a week and a half and determined that nothing beyond the failed valve would have prevented it from attempting a landing.
“The Griffin lander behind me has integrated all of those lessons learned,” he said. “This lander has a dual, redundant valve system with two dissimilar valves that both have to fail to have the same outcome. That will not happen. We are done with valve issues on our landers.”
“Programmatically, it is fundamentally different than how we operated with Peregrine,” Thornton said in a later interview. “Peregrine was designed to be the lowest-cost mission that could fly as fast as it could. With Griffin, it was always designed from the outset to fly a very complex science mission from NASA.”
“We’ve done way more testing on this vehicle than we did with Peregrine, and also incorporated all the lessons learned from Peregrine,” he said. “It’s as robust as we know how to do it.”
The company is similarly confident in its ability to land safely. Griffin uses an autonomous landing system that includes terrain relative navigation, where an onboard computer compares images of the surface from the lander’s cameras with a map to determine its position: “Neil Armstrong in a box,” said Andrew Horchler, chief research scientist at Astrobotic, in an interview.
That will be supplemented with a navigation Doppler lidar when the lander is a few kilometers above the surface, and then a hazard-detection lidar just above the surface that can detect obstacles as small as 15 centimeters across. That will determine the best landing location, feeding that information to the guidance computer to perform a divert maneuver to reach that site.
“What we’re doing right now, and have been doing, is going through that entire verification and validation process of our systems,” he said. That has included flight tests involving helicopters, aircraft and rocket-powered vehicles, as well as hardware-in-the-loop tests and thousands of software simulations.
Fitting into NASA’s Moon Base
Astrobotic developed Griffin-1 under a 2020 task order issued by NASA as part of its Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program. The task order covered the delivery of NASA’s Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) mission, then planned for late 2023.
However, NASA announced in July 2024 that it was canceling VIPER but would retain the CLPS task order for the Griffin-1 mission. NASA later changed course and decided to revive VIPER, electing to fly it instead on Blue Origin’s Blue Moon Mark 1 lander.
At a May 26 event, NASA announced that the Griffin-1 lander would be known as “Moon Base 2,” part of a renaming of three lander missions already under development under CLPS task orders. While named Moon Base 2, it is now likely the first to fly, given likely delays to the first Blue Moon Mark 1 lander, named Moon Base 1, after the pad explosion of a New Glenn rocket on May 28.
The name change is intended to be more than cosmetic. “We’re using CLPS as the vehicle, but we want to approach it a little bit different way. The contracts haven’t changed, but our focus and attention has,” said Carlos García-Galán, NASA program executive for Moon Base, in an interview.
That includes an increased focus on the reliability of landings. Of the four CLPS missions flown to date, only one — Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost 1 — landed safely and completed its full mission. Besides Peregrine’s in-flight anomaly, Intuitive Machines’ two lunar landers toppled upon landing, limiting their missions.
“We’re basically working to put the entire NASA might behind these companies that are developing landers,” he said, including access to NASA subject matter experts and testing facilities. “We’re talking about the people who are best at landing things on other planets.”
For Astrobotic, that has included providing more NASA experts to help the company. “If there’s another need for testing and such, we’re definitely going to help them with that,” he added.
NASA only has a few small payloads on this mission, but García-Galán said the agency wants to use it to learn more about the south polar region where Griffin-1 will be landing. “We really need to get ground truth on different areas of the south pole,” including terrain and temperature conditions.
“We have meter-scale knowledge of those areas where we need centimeters, so getting that ground truth on the environment is number one,” he said. A second priority will be gaining insights into the deployment and movement of Astrolab’s FLIP rover.
“In the first few landings, like this mission, the payload is less relevant than the act of getting there and trying things,” he said.
Thornton said Astrobotic welcomed the additional NASA support. “I think that’s fantastic,” he said. “That has been a good recipe for success for Astrobotic for a long time,” going back to a NASA program called Lunar Catalyst that predated CLPS, providing technical support for lunar lander developers through unfunded agreements.
“The more that we can do that, the better,” he said of NASA collaboration. “Scaling Peregrine up to Griffin was more difficult than we realized.”
Astrobotic does not have any CLPS awards after Griffin-1, but Thornton said he hopes to fill the space that lander will vacate in the company’s clean room soon. He said the company is bidding on a CLPS task order called CS-8 that was announced at the same Ignition event where NASA disclosed its lunar base plans. “We hope to hear news about that soon,” he said.
The higher cadence of landing missions, he added, will provide additional opportunities along with the company’s work on lunar power systems. “What’s really exciting about Moon Base is the cadence of landings is going to pick up dramatically, which means the cadence of opportunities is going to pick up.”