Military Moon Business Program: Building a self-sustaining enterprise on the Moon is a different matter entirely from travelling there. Under DARPA’s 10-Year Lunar Architecture, or LunA-10, programme, about 14 teams—including SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Northrop Grumman—will compete to launch a workable moon “architecture,” the agency said on Tuesday.
According to the RFP, DARPA is searching for concepts for “a future civil lunar framework,” for 2025 to 2035 and beyond—far beyond just another moon lander. Numerous robots for energy, movement, communications, and navigation may be part of that. In order to get them all to the lunar surface and eventually scale up to the size of widespread infrastructure on the moon, the goal is to figure out a method to send them all as part of “standard payloads.”
Just a lander, why not? Due to the fact that yesterday’s moonshots were isolated initiatives that produced minimal results for long-term lunar projects. China debuted an unmanned lander on the Moon’s far side in 2019, following the United States’ lead. Its next mission, scheduled for 2028, aims to land a robot capable of gathering samples from the moon and returning them to Earth.
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Military Moon Business Program
DARPA is making the wager that by concentrating more on what moon colonisation might actually entail, the US can develop a far larger range of technologies faster. That would position the US as the preferred logistics partner for other nations or businesses wishing to send workers to the moon for long-term commercial uses like mining.
Because it is difficult to track things approaching satellites from the opposite direction of Earth, the Pentagon is also concerned that China’s lunar missions pose a threat to American satellites and may have a covert military objective. It will be more difficult for China’s operations on the moon to go unnoticed the more economic activity there is.
