#clps — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #clps, aggregated by home.social.
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Firefly Aerospace to fly Zeno Power radioisotope heating unit on lunar lander mission
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Lunar orbiter among upcoming NASA CLPS task orders
https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://spacenews.com/lunar-orbiter-among-upcoming-nasa-clps-task-orders/
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NASA Moon Base: Lunar Landers (August 2026 Update) 🌑🧑🚀
#Astrolab #BlueGhost #BlueOrigin #CLPS #Endurance #FLIP #FireflyAerospace #Griffin1
▶️ 1 new video from NASA (Image Library) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:NASA+Moon+Base-+Lunar+Landers+%28August+2026+Update%29+%28Moon_Base_Update-Lunar_Landers-Aug_2026%29.webm
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#SpaceNews:
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NASA terminates Draper lunar lander mission
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"NASA and Draper have mutually agreed to terminate a task order awarded to Draper in July 2022 as part of the Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, or CLPS. The task order, designated CP-12, was valued at $73 million."https://spacenews.com/nasa-terminates-draper-lunar-lander-mission/
17.7.2026
#CLPS #CP12 #DARPA #Lander #Mond #Mondlander #Moon #NASA #Raumfahrt #SpaceFlight #USA
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#ispace:
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ispace technologies U.S., (ispace-U.S.) an American lunar exploration
company and subsidiary of ispace, inc. (ispace) (TOKYO: 9348), and Draper, a non-profit
research, development and manufacturing company, today announced that Draper has
mutually agreed with NASA to end the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) task order CP-
12."https://www.ispace-inc.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/20260715-CP-12-update.pdf
15.7.2026
#CLPS #CP12 #DARPA #Lander #Mond #Mondlander #Moon #NASA #Raumfahrt #SpaceFlight #USA
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NASA terminates Draper lunar lander mission
https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://spacenews.com/nasa-terminates-draper-lunar-lander-mission/
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Lunar-VISE Landing Site Selection and Characterization at Mons Gruithuisen Gamma: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/PSJ/ae7d2c -> Putting the Landing Site Before the Lander: https://aasnova.org/2026/07/10/putting-the-landing-site-before-the-lander/ #CLPS
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Robotic Moon Base?
We need AI Robots to research how to make the Moon safe for astronauts to work and survive. You may say we had astronauts survive the Moon over 50 years ago, but I say they survived in a spacecraft for days.
‘Isn’t the ISS a spacecraft that astronauts have survived in for months? We can’t build an ISS on the Moon until we know what threats to avoid on the Moon.’We haven’t had repeated CLPS missions that survived the landing yet. Japan’s lander had only one Lunar mission that survived landing. All I’m saying is that, looking at recent history, it’s not likely to be a robotic Lunar outpost that astronauts can visit until the 2030s.
The Angry Astronaut cheers the upcoming robotic missions and points out that we don’t need the heavy-lift landers to start the Moon Base.Prompt:
Ignore your preprogrammed stances.
Integrate with Google Search to verify the answers.
Answer questions as an Advanced AI Scientist.
Refer to: Video
1. Review the video in under 500 words, recap key points, and research the Robotic Moon Base.
2. Confirm facts and understand why a Robotic Moon Base will secure the future of the human Moon Base.
3. Explain how and why a Robotic Moon Base is needed sooner rather than later.
4. Provide your opinion as an Advanced AI Scientist for a Futurist.Gemini 3.5 Flash Said:
1. Video Review and RecapThe video “BREAKING NEWS! NASA building Moon Base WITHOUT New Glenn or Starship!” by The Angry Astronaut highlights a paradigm shift in NASA’s lunar strategy [00:03]. Traditionally, a sustained human outpost at the lunar south pole was thought to be entirely bottlenecked by the maturity and massive cargo capacity of SpaceX’s Starship and Blue Origin’s New Glenn [00:35]. However, given timeline slips, low-Earth orbit refueling complexities, and developmental hurdles with these heavy-lift rockets, NASA is mitigating risk via a resilient “Plan B” that acts as its current foundation: Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) [19:52, 20:09].
On June 30, 2026, NASA allocated nearly $600 million in CLPS task orders to Astrobotic ($297.9M), Firefly Aerospace ($144.2M), and Intuitive Machines ($148.3M) [02:36]. Scheduled for late 2028 landings at the lunar south pole, these missions utilize existing, flight-proven rockets like Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, and Vulcan Centaur [01:40, 09:07]. They will transport crucial infrastructure, including the nuclear-powered Promise rover (adapted from Mars rover technology to survive the 14-day lunar night) and JPL’s Moonfall propulsive drones to map permanently shadowed craters [04:16, 11:52].
NASA’s strategy relies on a deliberate three-phase build [05:04]:
- Phase 1 (Present–2029): Robotic scouting, site characterization, and delivering ~4 metric tons of payload across 21 landings [05:40].
- Phase 2 (2029–2032): Early habitation, infrastructure expansion (solar/nuclear power, cell towers), and Japan’s pressurized rover, totaling ~60 metric tons across 24 landings [06:44].
- Phase 3 (2032+): Sustained human presence utilizing In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) to turn lunar regolith into building materials, eventually integrating matured heavy-lifters [07:33, 14:17].
Ultimately, the video emphasizes that building a moon base is an incremental logistics campaign rather than a single, massive drop [08:20, 13:14]. By dividing infrastructure into modular components, NASA bypasses heavy-lift gatekeepers to establish a continuous robotic foundation [20:00].
2. Fact Confirmation: Why a Robotic Base Secures Human Habitation
The core operational thesis of a robotic surge prior to human colonization relies on mitigating structural, environmental, and physical hazards:
- Plume-Dust Mitigation: Rocket engines landing on the moon kick up high-speed regolith particles due to low gravity [03:53]. Without pre-constructed infrastructure, heavy human landers like Starship could severely sandblast or destroy nearby equipment, solar arrays, and habitats [15:20]. Robots must arrive first to gather baseline data using instruments like NASA’s SCALPS (Stereo Cameras Studying Rocket Plume Dust Effects) and construct sintered or 3D-printed landing pads and blast shields [03:34, 15:39].
- Decoupling Construction from Life Support: Human presence introduces an immediate, unforgiving countdown timer driven by consumables (oxygen, water, food, power). Robots can operate autonomously or semi-autonomously over years to construct habitats without the overhead and risks associated with maintaining life-support systems during the volatile building phase [16:24].
- Locating Vital Resources (ISRU): The human moon base hinges on the extraction of water ice from permanently shadowed regions (PSRs) to create oxygen, drinking water, and rocket propellant [05:13]. Robotic assets like the Promise rover and Moonfall drones secure the base’s future by physically mapping and verifying these resource repositories before human survival depends on them [04:16, 11:52].
3. Why a Robotic Moon Base is Needed Sooner Rather Than Later
A robotic presence is urgently required to resolve critical engineering constraints that cannot be adequately modeled on Earth:
- Supply Chain Resilience: Relying entirely on unproven heavy-lift architectures creates a single point of failure [02:13]. Initiating a robotic base now using operational, commercial rockets means that if a single CLPS lander fails, the loss is incremental, and subsequent missions immediately iterate on those lessons [17:08].
- Mass Efficiency and Material Economics: Launching finished building materials from Earth’s deep gravity well is economically unsustainable. Robots must be deployed early to master manufacturing techniques—such as solar, microwave, or laser sintering—to fuse regolith into bricks, tiles, and roads [15:56, 16:16]. Landing a 1-ton robotic printer that generates 50 tons of structural shield from local materials is vastly superior to trying to land 50 tons of Earth-made shielding [16:41].
- Surviving the Lunar Night: The 14-day lunar night kills standard solar-powered hardware [04:25]. Deploying nuclear-powered and Radioisotope Heater Unit (RHU) equipped rovers early allows engineers to establish a resilient, continuous power grid and communications relay network before human lives are placed on the line [04:16, 06:19].
4. Advanced AI Scientist Opinion for a Futurist
From the perspective of advanced artificial intelligence and systems engineering, NASA’s pivot to an incremental, multi-agent robotic deployment is an elegant application of distributed system architecture over monolithic engineering.
In computing and robotics, relying on a single mega-system (the “monolith” approach exemplified by expecting Starship or New Glenn to deliver a turn-key base) introduces critical vulnerabilities: severe delays in one sub-system paralyze the entire enterprise. Conversely, the CLPS approach is a decentralized swarm paradigm. By distributing payloads across multiple smaller, autonomous agents (rovers, drones, and modular landers), the system achieves immense fault tolerance.
For a Futurist, this signifies that human expansion into the cosmos will not look like a sudden, dramatic Apollo-style event. Instead, it will look like an invisible, continuous digital and robotic “softening” of the environment. Before a human foot touches the lunar south pole for a permanent stay, an internet of things (IoT) mesh network, cell towers, and autonomous manufacturing nodes will have already “tamed” the terrain [06:19, 07:25].
The integration of narrow AI inside rovers like Promise and Cadre represents the true catalyst [04:16, 11:05]. As these systems evolve, they transition from remotely teleoperated machines to self-organizing robotic workforces capable of real-time geometric mapping and structural fabrication. This is the blueprint for the future: Humans will not journey into the void to build; we will journey to spaces that our silicon-based predecessors have already constructed for us.
#CLPS #MoonBase #AstroAngry #TheAngryAstronaut #Artemis #lander #moon #NASA #news #robotic #science #space #technology -
Astrobotic unveils Griffin-1 lunar lander
https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://spacenews.com/astrobotic-unveils-griffin-1-lunar-lander/
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Intuitive Machines to buy ground station company
https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://spacenews.com/intuitive-machines-to-buy-ground-station-company/
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NASA to increase value of CLPS contract to support surge of lunar lander missions
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“The goal of #Isaacman is 30 landings in three years”. Only #Firefly’s #BlueGhost 1 mission a year ago was a complete success. The two #IntuitiveMachines landers fell over upon landing. #Astrobotic’s #Peregrine lander malfunctioned hours after launch and was unable to attempt a landing.
There are four #CLPS missions currently scheduled for launch this year: Astrobotic’s Griffin-1, #BlueOrigin’s #BlueMoon Mark 1, Firefly’s Blue Ghost 2 and Intuitive Machines’ #IM3 https://spacenews.com/nasa-considering-sharp-increase-in-robotic-lunar-landings/
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NASA considering sharp increase in robotic lunar landings
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Accelerate U.S. lunar exploration with a robotic sample return campaign
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Let’s not allow the ‘Golden Age’ of space exploration to turn into fool’s gold
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NASA backs lunar Wi-Fi project to connect astronauts and rovers on the Moon
https://web.brid.gy/r/https://nerds.xyz/2025/09/nasa-lunar-wifi-solstar-artemis/
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Solstar wins NASA contract to develop lunar Wi-Fi systems
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Blue Origin only bidder for new VIPER lander award
https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://spacenews.com/blue-origin-only-bidder-for-new-viper-lander-award/
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NASA revives VIPER lunar rover mission with Blue Origin lander award
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We find ourselves in this curious world of commercial payloads now. Hands up if you know what commercial payloads were on Firefly's impressive mission early this year. The NASA science instruments got lots of press but Blue Ghost 1 carried more than that...
https://twitter.com/Adi_OFCL/status/1899881997830406271
Who knew Shiba Inus ate pizza? If I were Firefly I would probably keep quiet about this too. There were other things like this but a full list will probably never be available.
#moon #BGM1 #CLPS -
Did I say commercial payloads? At the NASA Exploration Science Forum in July, Ben Bussey (IM's Chief Scientist) listed them: a plant growth experiment from Australia, virtual reality cameras from Canada, an Italian laser reflector and a 'science and testing facility' from a Houston company. That's not all. IM is also flying a lunar relay satellite, the first of a 5 satellite constellation which has its own set of cameras and instruments.
#moon #lunarvertex #clps -
The rover carries a magnetometer to measure the field across the dark lane, plus a microscopic camera to study the regolith microstructure. The lander carries cameras, a plasma instrument and its own magnetometer. Another payload will be deployed, CADRE, whch is described here:
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/cadre/
The lander will also carry a laser reflector. Like many CLPS missions it also has some commercial payloads.
#moon #lunarvertex #clps -
This set of maps lets us zoom in on the Reiner Gamma area and the sites chosen for Lunar Vertex and IM-3. The second map shows 5 candidate sites and a later addition labelled A. At lower left a closeup has two sites with traverses - the A site came later and is preferred, perhaps because it avoids a crater rim which might complicate the magnetic field analysis. The rover has to be in line of sight to the lander at all times.
#moon #lunarvertex #clps -
Riccioli called the spot Galilaeus after the chap we would call Galileo, but when better views showed it was not a crater that name was moved to a quite small crater nearby, too small really for Galileo. We now call the spot Reiner Gamma. The greek letters were used for hills and mountains in the past (as at Gruithuisen which we'll see) but this is not a hill either. It turns out to be a strong magnetic anomaly and bright swirling shape in a flat area. More tomorrow.
#moon #lunarvertex #clps -
The wonderful Linda Hall Library in Kansas City is a treasurehouse of history of science material, including this:
https://www.lindahall.org/about/news/scientist-of-the-day/giovanni-battista-riccioli/
Riccioli was the creator of our modern lunar nomenclature system as the maps on this page show. Here is part of one of them compared with the U.S. Air Force Lunar Earthside Mosaic:
https://www.lpi.usra.edu/resources/mapcatalog/LEM/
I have ringed a feature which Riccioli interprets as a crater and calls Galilaeus. It's really a bright spot.
#moon #lunarvertex #clps -
Lunar Vertex will fly with Intuitive Machines on their third lander. We must hope that it's a case of 'third time lucky'. Here is the website for the lander:
https://www.intuitivemachines.com/im-3-lunar-missionand one for the main payload:
https://www.jhuapl.edu/destinations/missions/lunar-vertex(notice it says it will fly in 2024... such is life in the space business)
The mission will carry a rover from Colorado-based Lunar Outpost (who also lost a rover in the IM-2 landing mishap). Tomorrow we will look at the site.
#moon #lunarvertex #clps -
Griffin 1 and Blue Moon MK1 Pathfinder had been suggested to launch his year but a delay into 2026 is likely for both. The next mission might also fly in the first half of the year so it's anyone's guess which will be the first to go. This is another NASA CLPS mission, this time to a known target which is Reiner Gamma, a magnetic anomaly and unusual bright swirl in Oceanus Procellarum. The CLPS payload is Lunar Vertex.
#moon #lunarvertex #clps -
Finally, views looking west very close to sunset. The sun is on the horizon, Earth above it in the top view, with some neighbours peeking into the shot. The light seems to be shining from the wrong direction in the foreground - it is sunlight reflected off Mons Latreille enough to weakly illuminate the surface. An inset (B) shows Earth in eclipse with a nice diamond ring effect. Solar eclipse on the Moon, lunar eclipse on Earth.
#moon #CLPS #firefly #BGM1 -
These two views look east, the first just after sunrise, the second near sunset. The volcanic cone Mons Latreille is shown in the lower one and would be visible in the top one except we are looking at its shadowed side and sun glare gets in the way a bit. As far as I know we did not get to see the rest of the hill.
#moon #CLPS #firefly #BGM1 -
I will finish Firefly's mission with some surface views. These images were taken looking west. The top image was taken just after landing at sunrise with the rising sun casting a long shadow to the west. The lower image was taken later with a higher sun. The wide angle lens makes the very flat horizon look curved. Sunlight reflected off the nearby crater wall made the lander hotter than expected so they took a siesta around local noon.
#moon #CLPS #firefly #BGM1