Many players in the space industry have shifted their focus from Earth's orbit and are looking beyond, to the moon, to Mars, and onward. A lot of the launch vehicles now have those destinations in mind, and for one example, NASA is focused on returning humans to the moon with the Artemis program. And the latest missions are going to look very different from what was seen with the Apollo program. For one thing, the commercial industry is playing a much bigger role. They're even designing lunar terrain vehicles for surface mobility. And one of the companies hoping to traverse the moon's surface is Lunar Outpost. [Music] Welcome to T-Minus Deep Space, I'm Maria Varmazis. Lunar Outpost is dedicated to providing innovative technology and services to enable a sustainable human presence in space. I spoke to their co-founder and chief strategy officer to find out more. My name is Forrest Mayan, I'm co-founder and chief strategy officer of Lunar Outpost, a interplanetary robotics company. Which is like the best intro ever because everyone goes, "Okay, that's awesome, tell me more about that." Now, I know about Lunar Outpost a teeny bit, but can you give me sort of the pitch? Because you guys do such amazing work, so I want to hear it. Yeah, so the long-term vision and why we're called Lunar Outpost is we want to use the resources of the moon for the betterment of all humankind. And we really see the moon as this stepping stone for humanity, right? It's like a blessing that it's just magically there, it's something to help us take our first step off into the cosmos. You could really imagine that space exploration and expanding beyond Earth would be a lot harder without something like the moon as a training ground, and also it's much more than that. Like I see the moon as Earth's eight continent. Really, the population and utilization of it, discovery of it, I mean, obviously it was not hard to discover. All humanity has always seen it and had a relationship with it. It's a little different than the new continents early on, discovering the new world. But the utility of it is exceptional for people on Earth and for exploring beyond. So we want to use the moon for resources to move heavy industry and mining off-world, capture those rare earth elements that are needed for electrification, grab some of those solar and planet volatiles that can unlock nuclear fusion type energy sources. There's water resources that can be used for helping sustain people on the moon, as well as providing propellant to reach out further towards Mars. And there's also a lot of science to be done, commercial activity and tourism. So we're kind of all in all of the above as far as business cases that support our expansion on the moon. But our niche focus, what we're really focused on is lunar surface mobility, because lunar surface mobility is going to enable all of these activities on the surface of the moon and enable the infrastructure that's going to make this new economy happen. Yeah, and you all at Space Imposium had a very, very popular booth because we got to see the incredible things that you all are building. It's so nice when there's like a physical thing that we can all oo and ah over. And can you tell me the latest on what you've been working on? Because it's been a few months since I spoke to AJ, so I'm sure some sense has been going on. So can you fill me in? Yeah, so at Space Imposium, you saw the unveiling of our Eagle Space Truck. So this is, you know, for people that are listening, it's a very futuristic, silver looking lunar vehicle that has seating for two astronauts. It's an open cabin because they're in spacesuits and they're on space, so they don't need windshields and windscreens. And then the back has a high utility truck bed with a robotic arm to load and unload things. And this vehicle is part of NASA's Lunar Terrain Vehicle Services Program, where they've solicited three vendors to design the next lunar vehicle for the Artemis astronauts. Our team is one of those selected vendors. And since then, we have continued to develop these vehicles. We have done multiple demonstrations of full autonomous navigation and driving of these vehicles. We've also completed some real critical milestone reviews for NASA, proving out the analysis of our design and that it's something that's feasible to hit the build button on, start manufacturing it and getting it ready for those astronauts. So for those of us who have like a very, very old concept of like Yoldi Moon Buggy, this is not that obviously. You guys are doing something much, much cooler, much newer. Can you, like what is your pitch to people, especially folks who are not necessarily space sappy? How different it is what you were building? Yeah, it's a huge difference. And the original Moon Buggy, the LRV was on the order of, you know, 450, 480 pounds. So it's light. It folded up into an origami piece that was stored in the limb, the lunar lander. And it was basically each drive for it lasted about three hours, three and a half hours, and then they threw it away and they left it on the surface of the Moon and came home. So each time they brought a new one. It was pretty primarily used for just the transportation of the astronauts. There are some instruments on board. The LTV is, it's not even in the same ballpark of like capability. Like the LTV, the services program is designed for a 10 year life. We're accomplishing that with multiple vehicles, but each vehicle can, you know, conceivably, you know, with a high probability even last 10 years in itself. These are vehicles that are designed to survive the lunar night. They're designed to haul well over 1,600 kilograms. We can do well over that, but that's the NASA requirement. They're, you know, they're fully functioning vehicles, not just from that aspect, but they've got the robotic arms. They can move payload. They can do infrastructure. And there's a lot of things that NASA hasn't even requested us to do that we can do with these vehicles. So there's a commercial business case here where we're going to use these vehicles to deploy infrastructure on the surface. We're going to use them to execute science missions for NASA or other sorts of international space agencies that want to do science. And so, yeah, it's a, it's a completely different vehicle. And it's, it's really exciting because it's, it's going to change everything we know about the moon once we get it up there. Yeah, I was going to say, thinking about the one day human, permanent human presence on the moon to be able to do, you know, build infrastructure with a vehicle like that and take serious payloads along with us. I mean, that would completely transform what we're capable of doing and even open up the kinds of missions that I think people maybe never would have dreamed or would even be possible. Yeah, I mean, there's, I mean, we haven't even started to scratch the surface of the types of missions, but there's, you know, there's prospecting missions where we're looking for those lunar resources. There's a lot of different science missions looking at the space environment, the lunar environment, a lot's unknown, especially in permanently shadowed regions, which are these areas that never see sunlight. We don't know like what the quality and quantity of the water is there. We don't know very much about kind of the temperatures and radiation environments there. So on the side side, we're going to be able to do quite a lot and then we can deploy much larger instruments. Think about a unique feature of the moon is it permanently, it kind of shields. The far side of the moon is kind of shielded from all the radiation and telescopes and radio frequencies from Earth. But you could use this vehicle to deploy a massive radio telescope in that quiet zone on the far side of the moon. You can use it to build habitats, landing pads. So yeah, lots of cool applications for it. NASA primarily wants to do science and then also get the astronauts where they need to be. Yeah, and then you mentioned also potential commercial applications. So again, a lot of people's gears, I'm sure, are turning at the possibilities that you all are opening up here. So that's my goodness. It's a very exciting time. It's really cool you all are building. You've got to be pretty jazzed about it because you... I'm excited. I mean, that's part of what we've done at Lunar Outpost is we've utilized this flywheel effect that NASA's put into. You know, put in place with things like just commercialization of lunar exploration. So they set up the commercial lunar payload services program. This is a program for landers that can send like 50 to 150 kilograms of payload to the surface of the moon. NASA is only buying part of the capacity. So they've opened it up for commercial, you know, businesses to participate. And this spring, we actually sent the first fully commercial lunar rover to the moon on one of these clips landers. So NASA created kind of the, you know, the funding and the path for commercial opportunity, that transportation system that commercial companies bid on. And then that enabled companies like us to send a rover with commercial partners. And so this was a small 10 kilogram class rover. We sent it to the moon earlier this spring, so late February and March. And this was something that wouldn't have happened without that synergy between private and public partnership. Like NASA didn't pay us to build this rover. We built the map rover, you know, with a whole bunch of partners, which I can talk about more later. But I don't want to go into too much of a monologue, but that's just like the first step. And then for LTV, it's, you know, imagine what you can do. Like that was, we did a lot of stuff with a 10 kilogram class rover with LTV. We're carrying, you know, thousands of kilograms, tons of material, you know, the sky's the limit. We'll be right back. [Music] Yeah, if you don't mind telling me more about the map rover, I would love to hear more about it. Because honestly, I mean, the fact that y'all got there and you were there, I mean, that and what you built and how you built it. I'm kind of hanging on every word here because I mean, you all are living a lot of people's dreams in bidshit. So it's kind of like, yeah, I'd love to hear more about this. Yeah, yeah. Okay, sure. So the map rover stands for Mobile Autonomous Prospecting Platform. So the goal is it's a small rover that can look for space resources on the moon and could utilize the space on these early Clips Landers. But we didn't bid for a proposal for NASA to get awarded this. We didn't wait for a long process and we just went out and said, we're building a rover. We're going to, we know there's a market there. We know there's a desire for this. Eventually we found a partner that needed a mobility solution for the moon. That partner was Nokia. Nokia wanted to demonstrate a 4G LTE network on the surface of the moon. And we said, hey, we can provide you a mobility solution, intuitive machines, provided a landing solution. And they put a radio on the lander. And then the goal was to put a radio on the rover and drive away from the lander and do kind of a, can you hear me now? Maybe that's the wrong company. But, you know, a sort of signal strength test for Nokia on the surface to really demonstrate this communications. And through the process, we partnered with lots of different companies. We partnered with MIT on some science instruments, NASA Ames on some science instruments. We partnered with Uventus, Adidas, like the Uventus Soccer Club and have a map rover line of jerseys. We had some prospecting sensors on there. Yeah, we had a whole soccer game where everyone was wearing jerseys with our lunar rover on it. You know, this is one of the premier teams in Italy. I was going to say that's not a small name. That's, wow. Yeah, yeah. So there's, you know, go online. I think you can still buy the merch. But yeah, it was just very cool. It brought space closer to home and closer to a new audience. And that's another exciting thing about commercialization is right now people, you know, their interests are very channelized on the internet. If you have an interest in a certain thing, you know, LinkedIn or Instagram or Facebook, we'll find what that thing is and focus you on that. You don't see things outside that often. And I think that happens a lot with space. Space people know a lot about space, not space people don't. So we're doing partners with, you know, Juventus and we have another partnership with Lego. Other people are kind of seeing what can be done in space. And it's bringing them closer to home and kind of breaking that algorithm wall that exists for so many people. Yeah, also Lego. Oh my God. There's a giant Lego in here. We got a Lego set coming out in August. But yeah, so check out, you know, Lunar Outpost, Rover, it's on the Lego website so I can talk about it now. That's so cool. I'm adding that to my list. I love what you're talking about about the public-private partnership and opening up these silos also. I think that is so noteworthy and I just wanted to call that out because that is the goal for, I think, a lot of people in our our silo is to try and figure out that path. I would love to know what that was like for you, for you all to kind of figure out those partnerships because like that's very difficult to do. But also, I mean, you did it. So like what did you learn from that? What were those takeaways? That's fascinating. Yeah, I mean, it's an important thing to establish credibility early on because when you talk to these, you know, different partners, non-traditional companies, a lot of them are just not even briefed on what's going on in space. Many of them don't know that NASA's going back to the moon with the Artemis program. So when you are a small company, you're like, "Yeah, we're sending Rover to the moon. Let's do something cool." You really have to have that credibility, you know, at the table to show them, "Yes, this is a real thing. You know, here's Rover Lander contracts." And, you know, by having the systems built and tested and then be able to update those systems to integrate new payloads really helped us with that. And then it's, you know, it's talking to a lot of people, a lot of outreach, you know, working your connections and just being, you know, just being a great person to work with. I think people can read you pretty quickly, you know, when you bring something like this and to the table. And so there are people that just, you know, maybe won't get it or see the point of space. And there's other people that, you know, you just, you're kind of giving your pitch and then you see something click and they realize, yes, you know, sending this stuff to the moon is going to be amazing. Everyone has a connection with the moon, whether you're a space person or not, everyone's seen the moon. And once you send stuff up there like a Rover, your brand, your technology, your product, it's there forever. So, you know, this, all of our payloads, the map Rover on the mission, we operated in space, we transported on the lander. Unfortunately, the lander didn't land upright on the moon, landed on top of us, but we still communicated and operated the Rover there. So many of our payload partners achieved a lot of their objectives and they created this, you know, this moment where their stuff is there on the moon. You know, they did something amazing and all of our partners have said that they want to do it again. So they like the experience and we're just going to go for, you know, even more exciting missions. And we have a lot of them coming up. And so, LTV is three or four missions down the road. But we're building that base and that community right now. Thank you for that insight. I just find that really fascinating. So yeah, you mentioned LTV is a few missions ahead, but you've got some stuff that's closer timeline wise. So tell me a bit about it. One of them is lunar voyage. Is that correct? Yeah. So lunar voyage is what we call like any of our missions, right? So a lot of people just say in space, they just say M1, M2, M2, M3, M4, right? Like mission one, mission two, mission three, not that creative, right? So we call them lunar voyages or LV1 because it's, you know, it's a voyage. We want to take you on the experience. Kind of romantic. I like it. I like it. Yeah. So lunar voyage, we thought about like naming, you know, vehicles on different, you know, South Pole exploration, you know, vessels, but, you know, most of those things end up sinking at some point. And we're like, yeah, we won't go that far with the naming scheme. But for the missions, yeah, we call them lunar voyages. So lunar voyage two is our second mission to the moon. That's upcoming and it's less than a year out. This one is cool because our first mission was unique, you know, first commercial rover mission in history, first US teleoperated rover on the moon. This next mission is actually funded by NASA. So now, now we're, you know, this was our first one. The public private thing. We were funded by the big games. Yeah. Yeah. NASA was like, hey, you know, they, they could do it, right? You know, they built a rover. We established that credibility and, and we partnered with John Hopkins applied physics lab to create this, this vehicle for this mission called lunar vertex. This is a really cool mission because it's a science mission and it's unlocking a mystery that has, has dumbfounded scientists for, well, over 100 years. So on the moon, you know, through a telescope, you can see that there's these little swirls on the mid latitude. This part of the moon is named Reiner Gamma. Later with instrumentation orbiting the moon, it was detected that there are magnetic anomalies near this part of the moon. And so there's a, there's a magnetic anomaly and there's also a visual anomaly of these swirls on the moon. And so what this rover is going to do is it has a magnetometer on the top of it. That's going to detect a magnetic field. And then below the rover, there's a kind of like a microscope that's going to look at the surface. And so simultaneously we'll take measurements of the magnetic field and then we'll also see that visual transition of the material to try to understand what is kind of causing that anomaly. And the hope is that can help us. Yeah, exactly. Like, you know, the hope is it can help us figure out like why it's there, why is the moon there? But, you know, maybe that's where, you know, the Autobots are, you know, hidden on the moon or who knows, you know, alien societies, probably not, probably not. Probably not. Maybe not transformers, but who knows? I mean, who knows. Yeah. But it'll give us, it'll give us unique insights on the formation of the moon or place in the solar system. And, you know, I'm always interested of how those things relate to different resources on the moon. Because that's, you know, that's a big passion of mine and the goal of the company is to find and utilize those. Yeah. And I wouldn't be surprised if whatever we learn from this, that's a very cool mission, by the way. I'm obsessed with the hexagon on Saturn. So it's always interesting for me to hear like what random things going up to the ISS kind of relate to research about that. And I wouldn't be surprised if there's a relation. Who knows? It's just so cool how we find these random things. And I didn't know about these on the moon. I learned something new today. So thank you for that. That's really neat. Yeah. So that is your, the upcoming mission within, within about a year. So are there other things that you want to share about what's coming up next? Yeah. We've got, we've got a ton of missions. Some of those are unannounced. So this, you know, unfortunately, I can't break, break the news here. I understand. But there are, but there are some that are announced. So what is, what is dubbed lunar voyage three is a, another commercial mission. So this one has some commercial payloads and then some science payloads from scientific agencies. So that one's in works. It's a little bit under wraps as we focus on lunar voyage two, but that one's moving along really well and is very, very far along. Then the next one is a lunar voyage two. Is that intuitive machines as well? Or is that a different launch provider? Sorry, not launch provider. Yeah. Sorry. Yeah. Lander. Yep. Lander. Sorry. Got my internal. Yes. And two new machines. Cool. Yeah. Yeah. And then lunar voyage four is, you know, it's an internal name for this mission because the name for this mission is lunar trailblazer. And so this is Australia's flagship mission. So we do call it lunar trailblazer. And that is a rover that is going to go to surface moon do also some more exploration, but this rover is built out of our Australian office in Melbourne, Australia. And it's has a lot of collaborators from all across Australia. So we're engaging both the Australian industry and academia for this. And that's a very cool international opportunity to really, you know, work with Australia in creating new science and exploration for their, you know, relatively recently founded, you know, space agency. And at the same time, we're, you know, utilizing a lot of capabilities of Australia because there is so much talent in Australia that is just yearning to be part of space. And this mission is enabling that to happen. And there's a lot of kind of like learning and development going on there. We're really excited spending that office up was very, very quick because there's excellent engineers there and they all want to do space stuff. And this is a way to give people the opportunity to do that in Australia without having to, you know, leave the country to, you know, go to America or Europe to participate in space activities there. Yeah, I've been very, yeah, I've been so impressed by what's been going on in Australia space wise in the past few years. And how quickly, as you, as you mentioned how quickly it's been spinning up because there is so much talent there. So definitely, is this the Rover mission, by the way? Is that the one with the amazing name? Yep. Yep. It's the Rover. That's the name of it. So you never know when you put those things out for public vote, right? You never know what the name is going to come back. It's always a little bit risky from the organizer's perspective, but Rover came out. Yeah, perfect. That's, that's an amazing name. I cannot top that name. I think when that news broke, I remember thinking that you cannot get any better than that name. It's just absolutely perfect. That's so great. That, that has to be just so much, so fulfilling to work on all of these things. Is there anything else that you wanted to make sure that you mentioned to the audience before we wrap up? The free space part I told you about, or it's like, whatever you like. Free space. I'll take it. It's free space. Yeah. So, yeah, for everyone listening, please check out www.lunaroutpost.com. We are hiring a lot. We've got offices in Melbourne, Australia, Luxembourg, and Denver, Colorado, or Golden Denver area. And we are, we're expanding pretty rapidly. We are growing lots of programs and kind of expanding even beyond the current space that we're in. And so if you want to just work hard, work fast, make a difference, do things that are unique, and kind of make people scratch their head of how do they do that. This is the place for you. So check out, check out our careers page. And Maria, thank you very much for inviting me on your podcast. I really appreciated talking with you. So I hope, I hope we get some time to talk more, but I think you got a really interesting show and look forward to listening to it. [Music] That's Team I in His Deep Space, brought to you by N2K Cyberwire. We'd love to know what you think of our podcast. Your feedback ensures we deliver the insights that keep you a step ahead in the rapidly changing space industry. If you like the show, please share our rating and review in your podcast app. Please also fill out the survey in our show notes or send an email to space@n2k.com. We are proud that N2K Cyberwire is part of the daily routine of the most influential leaders and operators in the public and private sector. From the Fortune 500 to many of the world's preeminent intelligence and law enforcement agencies. N2K helps space and cybersecurity professionals grow, learn, and stay informed. As the nexus for discovery and connection, we bring you the people, technology, and ideas shaping the future of secure innovation. Learn how at N2K.com. N2K's senior producer is Alice Carruth. Our producer is Liz Stokes. We're mixed by Elliot Peltzman and Tre Hester with original music by Elliot Peltzman. Our executive producer is Jennifer Eiben. Peter Kilpe is our publisher, and I'm your host, Maria Varmazis. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.
