Lunar Lander Failures Offer a Warning to Commercial Missions
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The apparent failure of an Indian spacecraft to land on the moon this month is providing a reminder to NASA and its commercial partners of the challenges of not only the missions themselves but sharing data on problems they experience.
If Vikram crashed during landing, as many fear, it will be the second spacecraft this year to fail to land on the moon intact. Beresheet, a lander built by Israel Aerospace Industries for SpaceIL, suffered a malfunction during a landing attempt in April, causing the spacecraft to crash to the surface. Unlike Vikram, the mission team declared the landing unsuccessful shortly after losing contact.
Those failures are taking place as NASA is working with nine companies in the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program on robotic lunar landers that can carry NASA research payloads to the surface of the moon. Two of those companies, Astrobotic and Intuitive Machines, have awards from NASA to carry payloads on missions scheduled for launch in 2021.
None of the nine companies have yet to fly their landers, and the recent failures provide a reminder of how difficult it is to soft-land on the moon.
"From a management perspective, we just know this is hard and it's clear that our contractor pool has a steep challenge on their hands," said Camille Alleyne, deputy manager of the CLPS program at NASA's Johnson Space Center, during a Sept. 12 panel discussion at the American Astronautical Society's Wernher von Braun Memorial Symposium in Huntsville, Alabama.
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