As a SpaceX engineer working on the Starship program about five years ago, Jaret Matthews could see the future of spaceflight quite clearly and began to imagine the possibilities.
For decades everything that went to space had to be carefully measured, optimized for mass, and serve an extremely specialized purpose. But Starship, Matthews believed, held the potential to change all that. With full reusability, a barn-size payload fairing, and capability to loft 100 or more metric tons to orbit in a single throw, Starship offered the tantalizing prospect of a world in which flying into space was not crazy expensive. He envisioned Starships delivering truckloads of cargo to the Moon or Mars.
Matthews spent a decade working on robots and rovers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory before coming to SpaceX in 2012. He began to suggest that the company work on a system that could unload and distribute cargo from Starship, like the cranes and trucks that offload cargo from large container ships in port. However, he didn't get far, as SpaceX was focused on developing the Starship transportation system.
So he left SpaceX and founded a company to develop a cargo-carrying rover.
"It was thinking about the implications of Starship that prompted me to found Astrolab," he said. "The premise was that, if we’re really going to go to Mars, the first thing we’re going to have to do is set up a bunch of equipment. I left SpaceX knowing the width of the Starship door, and we made the biggest thing that could pass through it."
AdvertisementThis turned out to be a prototype rover. Matthews related his history with SpaceX as we stood on top of a 3-meter-wide vehicle in an asphalt parking lot near Johnson Space Center in Houston. Standing about a meter off the ground, we had a commanding view, and soon he told me to grab the joystick. Off we went—backward and forward, sideways and at odd angles.
Shortly after Matthews let me drive around the parking lot in various modes, I had three immediate thoughts. It was a hell of a lot of fun to drive. For someone like me with limited piloting skills, it was remarkably intuitive to handle. And holy crap, can you imagine being an astronaut driving across the Moon in this?
Getting on board with NASA
Matthews can. He founded Astrolab in January 2020. It was terrible and terrific timing. The bad part was the onset of COVID-19 just weeks later. The good part was that, early that year, NASA released its first request for information about a "Lunar Terrain Vehicle" to support the activities of its Artemis astronauts on the surface of the Moon. In those first months, the company consisted of Matthews and the company's chief engineer, Rius Billing, replying to that request.
But they did not just complete paperwork. Almost immediately Matthews and a small but growing team began building this full-size prototype rover. By the end of 2021 they invited noted Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, now on the company's board of advisers, out to the desert to test-drive the vehicle while wearing a spacesuit.
The fully functional prototype can drive up to 9 mph (15 km/h) and has a 6-degrees-of-freedom robotic arm on the front to handle cargo. The structures and mechanisms on the vehicle are designed for flight, and the rover has prototype tires for the rugged lunar surface. Essentially, the vehicle is a pathfinder for Astrolab to develop a flight vehicle, FLEX, that could launch to the Moon as early as 2026.
Perhaps the most striking thing about FLEX is that astronauts are standing up rather than sitting down. This is for several reasons. Standing up provides a better view of the terrain, and it is much easier to get aboard the vehicle in a cumbersome spacesuit, Matthews said. Additionally, in the lower-gravity environment of the Moon, standing is as comfortable as sitting.
Earlier this month NASA announced three finalists to develop a Lunar Terrain Vehicle for the Artemis missions. One of them was Astrolab, which led a team that includes Axiom Space to design astronaut interfaces; and Odyssey Space Research, which will help with software development. They will compete alongside teams led by Intuitive Machines and Lunar Outpost for one or, at most, two contracts for lunar rovers.
"I don’t think we would have been chosen if we hadn’t taken this path," Matthews said, referring to building the FLEX pathfinder vehicle. It helped establish credibility with NASA. The two other teams had large traditional contractors on board, with Northrop Grumman supporting Intuitive Machines, and Lockheed Martin playing a major role for Lunar Outpost. Astrolab, by contrast, was small and new.
Design, build, test
Developing the pathfinder was part of Astrolab's ethos, embracing a spiral development model of design, build, test, break, and start over when it comes to hardware development. It's a lesson that Matthews and most other employees at the company—of Astrolab's 30 employees, more than 80 percent have SpaceX backgrounds—learned building reusable rockets and spacecraft.
AdvertisementUnloading tons of cargo on the Moon may seem like a preposterous notion. During Apollo, mass restrictions were so draconian that the Lunar Module could carry two astronauts, their spacesuits, some food, and just 300 pounds (136 kg) of scientific payload down to the lunar surface. By contrast, Starship is designed to carry 100 tons, or more, to the lunar surface in a single mission.
This is an insane amount of cargo relative to anything in spaceflight history, but that's the future that Matthews is tacking toward. This video provides a sense of how FLEX might work, autonomously, on the lunar surface to unload cargo pallets on the Moon. Then, when astronauts arrive, it could convert into a vehicle capable of traveling 12 miles (20 km) between charges with crew on board.
The company plans to have its first space-capable rover ready to launch by 2026 to the Moon and has contracted with SpaceX for Starship to deliver it. But which Starship? "We're a rideshare payload on whatever Starship they want to put us on during that window," Matthews said.
This first lunar rover will be for uncrewed activities only, with racks to carry 60 different payloads the size of a 12U cubesat. So far, Astrolab has sold about 30 percent of the capacity.
After that, the next vehicle could be for the Artemis program and its astronauts. But that depends on NASA. Over the next year each of the three Lunar Terrain Vehicle teams will work with the space agency to reach what is known as a "preliminary design review" for their vehicle. After this initial design work is complete, NASA will select at least one, or potentially more depending on its budget, company to press ahead with a demonstration of its rover on the lunar surface later this decade or in the early 2030s.
"We are myopically focused on surface mobility," Matthews said of Astrolab. "I founded the company to make this. I was intent of making essentially this platform before the Lunar Terrain Vehicle program was created."
