NASA Selects 12 Payloads for Upcoming Commercial Lunar Payload Services Flights

It’s a long list, and I don’t see any specific flight assignments yet, but there are a few payloads of note in here:

  • MoonRanger, a small rover from Astrobotic with Andrew Horchler as the principal investigator. Andrew appeared on the podcast a year ago with Michael Provenzano to talk about CubeRover, which has gone mysteriously silent and sounds a lot like MoonRanger.
  • PlanetVac, a sample acquisition system from Honeybee Robotics.
  • LISTER, a horrible acronym yet really interesting sounding drill that will attempt to make its way 2 to 3 meters into the surface of the Moon.
  • SAMPLR, which will use a flight spare of the Mars Exploration Rovers’ arms to investigate lunar regolith.