WASHINGTON — DARPA has selected 14 companies, ranging from small startups to established aerospace corporations, to participate in a study on developing commercial lunar infrastructure.
DARPA announced Dec. 5 that 14 companies will collaborate over the next seven months on its 10-Year Lunar Architecture, or LunA-10, study. The goal of the effort, announced in August, is to develop an integrated architecture to support a commercial lunar economy by the mid-2030s.
“LunA-10 has the potential to upend how the civil space community thinks about spurring widespread commercial activity on and around the Moon within the next 10 years,” Michael Nayak, DARPA program manager for LunA-10, said in a statement.
The 14 companies selected are:
- Blue Origin
- CisLunar Industries
- Crescent Space Services LLC
- Fibertek, Inc.
- Firefly Aerospace
- GITAI
- Helios
- Honeybee Robotics
- ICON
- Nokia of America
- Northrop Grumman
- Redwire Corporation
- Sierra Space
- SpaceX
The companies, Nayak said in a statement, each offered “a clear vision and technically rigorous plan for advancing quickly towards our goal: a self-sustaining, monetizable, commercially owned-and-operated lunar infrastructure.”
The statement did not elaborate on the roles of each company, but in a presentation last month at the Beyond Earth Symposium, Nayak said companies were selected for work in six areas: communications and navigation; construction and robotics; market analysis; mining and in situ resource utilization (ISRU); power; and transit, mobility and logistics.
Some of the companies have disclosed details about their roles in LunaA-10. CisLunar Industries, a Colorado-based startup, said it will work on what it calls the Material Extraction, Treatment, Assembly and Logistics, or METAL, framework for lunar resources as part of the study.
Firefly Aerospace said in a statement that it will outline an “aggregated hub of on-orbit spacecraft that dock…
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