The quest for water heads to the moon, via spacecraft built in Colorado
Story first appeared in:
Yes, there is water on the moon.
But what’s it like? How much is there? Where is it? And, on everyone’s mind, could humans drink it or at least mine the molecules and live off the liquid should we relocate to space?
These questions and more could be answered with the help of the Lunar Trailblazer, a dishwasher-sized shiny satellite that left Littleton in late January, enroute to Cape Canaveral. In Florida, the smallish satellite will hitch a ride on a Space X Falcon 9 rocket as soon as Wednesday and head toward a comfortable orbit around the moon.
“We hope it leads to our understanding of the water cycle on the moon — where water is located and how it changes over time, given the different temperatures, solar radiation exposure, dark side to light side and all that,” said Ryan Pfeiffer, Lockheed Martin’s program manager for the Lunar Trailblazer project, at the Waterton campus in Littleton.
This story first appeared in
Colorado Sunday, a premium magazine newsletter for members.
Experience the best in Colorado news at a slower pace, with thoughtful articles, unique adventures and a reading list that’s a perfect fit for a Sunday morning.
It’s not the first moon mission for Lockheed Martin’s space division, which is headquartered just south of Chatfield State Park. Lockheed was part of 1998’s Lunar Prospector to map out moon surfaces. It’s been NASA’s primary contractor for the Orion spacecraft on the Artemis missions — the one sending humans back to the moon. And while Lockheed had started on the moon rover vehicle for the Artemis III mission, it bowed out last fall due to business strategy conflicts with a partner on the project.
Lockheed is also a major part of Colorado’s aerospace industry and it’s joined by numerous small and large companies who are all-in on exploring the moon and beyond. More than 55,000 Coloradans work directly with aerospace companies, and another 184,000 indirectly, according to the state’s Office of Economic Development and International Trade.
That ranks Colorado as the nation’s top state for per capita aerospace employment, OEDIT Executive Director Eve Lieberman said in an email. And that continues to expand.
“We currently host 2,000 aerospace companies,” she said, “an increase of 26% over the last five years, that support and create jobs that sustain families and communities.”
A simpler mission
The satellite sat in a clean room on Lockheed’s campus in late January and looked more like a school science project than high-tech space craft. (“There’s zero need to put design form over function. It’s all about function because no one ever sees it,” Lockheed spokesperson Gary Napier said.) The key water-searching technologies were hidden behind a shiny foil-like wrapper, actually aluminum honeycomb covered by carbon fiber. It’s very strong, durable and doesn’t expand or contract in extreme heat or cold.
Various objects were attached to the box, sealed with what looked like translucent orange duct tape. That’s Kapton film, “the world’s most expensive Scotch tape,” Pfeiffer joked.
Lockheed Martin prepares to ship the NASA Lunar Trailblazer spacecraft (here showing a detail of the folded-up solar panels) to Kennedy Space Center on Jan. 23. The spacecraft will collect data about the lunar water cycle and is scheduled to launch to the moon from Kennedy on Feb. 26. (Kathryn Scott, Special to The Colorado Sun)
All of it, he said, is “part of the thermal blanketing. That’s how we assemble it.”
Temperatures on the moon vary widely — from 250 degrees Fahrenheit during the day to minus 208 at night just at the equator, according to NASA. The thermal layers, Kapton tape and built-in thermal radiators help the spacecraft “maintain temperatures more like room temperature. It tries to keep the electronics at 25 Celsius, sometimes colder, sometimes warmer,” said Bronson Collins, the project’s chief engineer. “A lot of the spacecraft’s job is managing heat.”
The Lunar Trailblazer is a relatively tiny project for Lockheed and the U.S. space program. In fact, it’s part of a category NASA calls SIMPLEx, or Small Innovative Missions for Planetary Exploration. Such missions are typically for research, are on a sub-$100 million budget, and are squeezed into underutilized space on rockets (Lunar Trailblazer is ridesharing with Intuitive Machines’ IM-2 to get a drill to the moon).
The cost of the Lunar Trailblazer mission is around $80 million, which may seem high, but not really when compared with other NASA projects. Artemis missions have budgets in the billions of dollars each, according to a government audit. The Europa Clipper, which blasted off in October and is heading to Jupiter’s Europa moon in search of water, has a $5 billion price tag.
Lockheed’s contribution is building the spacecraft. The visionary behind this water-hunting trip is Bethany Ehlmann, a professor of planetary science at California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California.
A trained geologist, Ehlmann specialized in studying water on Mars. But about a decade ago, she attended a workshop about water on the moon and wound up brainstorming with colleagues from CalTech and Jet Propulsion Laboratory on a research mission to see what sort of water was on the moon and where it was. NASA funded the project in the summer of 2019.
“The basic goal of the Lunar Trailblazer mission is to understand the form, the distribution and the abundance of water on the moon and the lunar water cycle,” said Ehlmann, who won’t be in Florida for the launch but will be monitoring it from the operations room at CalTech. JPL and Lockheed will also support the mission from their facilities.
She’s not expecting to find liquid that can be splashed around — more like ice, or frost, or water molecules embedded in rocks. Since there’s no atmosphere on the moon, water doesn’t pool or settle into lakes as on Earth. On the moon, water would instantly vaporize. But it appears to be in the crevices of the moon where the sun never shines. The satellite that Lockheed built can better examine what forms of water exist on the moon.
“We’re making maps of where the water is and how much is there because if we’re going to send (manned) missions … you need to know where to go and how much you’re likely to find,” she said. “Are you likely to find minerals with half a percent of water within them? Or are you going to literally find a block of dirty ice sitting on the surface? It’s kind of important to answer that question to guide future landed explorations of the moon.”
How to find water on the moon
To keep the costs within the smaller budget, Lunar Trailblazer isn’t starting from scratch. It’s using technology from its science friends.
JPL provided a special imaging spectrometer called the High-resolution Volatiles and Minerals Moon Mapper or HVM3 to capture images not visible to the human eye (“When it takes a picture of the surface, every single pixel has a spectrum associated with it and from the spectrum, you can tell what the surface is made of,” Ehlmann said).
The Lunar Thermal Mapper from the University of Oxford can measure temperatures on the moon surface. The instrument was funded by the UK space agency as an international partnership. It creates heat maps based on temperature, and will also map out physical properties of the moon in greater detail.
Ehlmann said they’re also relying on existing moon data from past missions that “provide hints of where water is, like on a few kilometers scale,” she said. The Lunar Trailblazer can zoom in on those exact spots and take higher resolution images along the lines of “tens of meters scale,” or magnifying objects by more than 100 times.
“We’re able to really leverage the fact that NASA and other countries have already made pretty good maps of the moon,” she said. “But we’re going to make an awesome water-focused one at a resolution that will enable future landers or rovers or hoppers or astronauts to go exactly to the most interesting water deposits.”
When it does launch, the satellite will shoot past the moon, spend a few months working its way back and settle about 100 kilometers away from the moon’s surface. That journey could take four to seven months. Once in orbit, it will start scanning to gather details of the suspected water spots down below. The tools will measure reflected light and thermal emissions so scientists can analyze the composition and temperature to see if what they think is water is water and if so, find out if it changes throughout the day.
From launch to the end, Lunar Trailblazer’s trip is expected to last two years.
At the peak of the project, there were probably just four to five technicians assembling the vehicle, while engineers were back in their offices. By the time the satellite shipped out of Littleton last month, Lockheed didn’t have anyone working on the project full time. They’d moved on to work on other Lockheed space projects, including Artemis missions, lunar infrastructure and planetary robotic and weather missions, such as DAVINCHI and GeoXO.
“It’s really unlocking a kind of future habitation of the moon long term, which is really hard to do without water. And if you don’t know where it’s going to be, it’s really hard to plan your mission,” Pfeiffer said. “That’s part of the science that the team really wants to get out of this.”
In Colorado, it’s not just about water
The quest for water in space is international, with missions in progress from India, China, Russia, Korea and Japan, said Angel Abbud-Madrid, a professor and director of the Center for Space Resources at the Colorado School of Mines.
“As a good Coloradan, you know that water is the most important resource that humans go after everywhere they go,” Abbud-Madrid said. “Not only is it important for humans to survive, but if you’re on the moon, water can also be useful to grow plants and it’s the best shielding element from radiation there is.”
It could also be used as fuel, he added. Heat it up and it becomes steam to propel a rocket. Split it into hydrogen and oxygen to create “the most energetic propellant combination that you can find,” he said. “And once you have fuel in space, you can avoid bringing everything from Earth, which is extremely expensive because we have to overcome this thing called gravity.”
The dream is to get people to the moon again, and not just for a flyby, but to live for extended periods of time. To do that means getting rockets, lunar landers, rovers, equipment to extract water and building infrastructure up there.
All of that has a Colorado connection, Abbud-Madrid said.
Lockheed has the Orion spacecraft to take us to the moon. United Launch Alliance, headquartered in Centennial has the Vulcan rocket, which is providing more access to space. Blue Origin, which opened an office in Highlands Ranch in 2022, just launched the New Glenn rocket, which would compete with SpaceX to make space more affordable.
“Lowering the cost is key,” Abbud-Madrid said. “The moment you lower (the cost of) access to space, things are going to start happening. Just like on Earth. It has been so expensive that only a few countries have gone and only about 600 people have gone out to space.”
Once in space, Japan’s iSpace, which picked Denver as its U.S. headquarters in 2020, is designing a lunar lander scheduled to take off next year for the far side of the moon.
Golden-based Lunar Outpost is working with General Motors and Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company on the Lunar Dawn vehicle, which will help the astronauts drive around the moon to explore farther into its extreme environment.
Lunar Outpost has also partnered with Nokia to get the first 4G/LTE cellular network on the moon, which is joining the Trailblazer on the Falcon 9 rocket. Honeybee Robotics, a subsidiary of Blue Origin with an office in Longmont, has developed drills that will be used on the moon’s south pole to find out if there’s water below the surface.
And once there’s fuel available, it will make more sense for space craft to fuel up on the moon since there’s less gravity. The energy for rockets to push past Earth’s gravity and get into space can be 90% of the rocket’s mass. So … space gas stations. Lafayette-based Orbit Fab, which in 2019 became the first private company to resupply water to the International Space Station, is working on refueling stations for spacecraft.
“A base on the moon is in the plans by NASA by the end of the decade,” Abbud-Madrid said. “Once you start having humans for a sustained presence, you’re going to have to provide them with water to drink, oxygen to breathe, construction materials for habitats and landing paths and roads. … All these companies are working on that.”
And from there, there’s the rest of deep space, said Whitley Poyser, director of Lockheed Martin Space’s business transformation program office.
“For me personally, I like to talk about deep space as all the planets except for Earth. And that’s not because we don’t care about Earth but because it helps us better understand where we live,” Poyser said. “Going to the moon is a very important part of that ecosystem. We have to understand our closest planetary body to help us be informed, especially as we explore deeper into deep space, which is also our mission.”