NASA Hires Firefly Aerospace to Build a Drone Aircraft Carrier -- to the Moon

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Project MoonFall

It sounds a spot similar a James Bond movie title, but NASA has dubbed its latest lunar task "MoonFall." Launching atop an as-yet-unidentified bearer rocket sometime successful 2028, Firefly Aerospace volition nonstop 1 of its Elytra Dark spacecraft (the largest and astir susceptible of the Elytra versions) to the Moon. Its cargo: 4 550-pound, 7-foot-wide, 4-foot-tall "hopping" drones built for NASA by CalTech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). Thirty miles supra the lunar surface, Elytra volition deploy its cargo to descend independently to the Moon. (Elytra itself volition stay successful lunar orbit.)

The 4 drones volition onshore connected the lunar aboveground astatine aggregate sites. Then they volition walk the adjacent 14 days hopping each astir the lunar southbound pole, utilizing their rockets to motorboat into the "air" and past descend backmost to the surface. During each hop, the MoonFall drones volition usage high-definition cameras to representation the aboveground they traverse. Their ngo is to make the highest-resolution representation of the lunar aboveground ever created, observe imaginable caches of h2o ice, and corroborate imaginable landing sites for Artemis IV and aboriginal crewed missions.

What it means for Firefly

Given each the missions NASA has planned for its MoonFall drones, the terms it's paying Firefly to behaviour the ngo looks bargain-basement inexpensive -- conscionable $75 million. (Paying JPL to physique the drones, and hiring a rocket institution to motorboat them and Elytra to the Moon volition adhd immoderate tens of millions much to the full task cost.)

Firefly gets much retired of this ngo than conscionable money, however. Scouting landing sites for Artemis IV and aboriginal missions, Firefly is making itself integral to Project Artemis. There's large PR worth successful that (as good arsenic rod presumption erstwhile bidding connected further Artemis contracts).

The institution is besides utilizing MoonFall arsenic an advertisement to punctual investors of its occurrence successful landing the lone (upright) ngo to the Moon successful the past 50-plus years. As the institution points out: "Firefly's Elytra spacecraft are built with proven systems from [the Blue Ghost Mission 1 lunar lander], including the halfway avionics, c composite structures, and Spectre engines that enabled the archetypal palmy commercialized Moon landing."