Argonaut ‘fully European’ freighters will learn lessons from previous crashes
The European Space Agency today announced an all-European consortium of contractors for Argonaut, a €600 million (U.S. $690 million) uncrewed lunar cargo lander, which officials said will provide the agency with a level of self-determination in space exploration that hasn’t existed for any of its previous major missions.
“This means that Argonaut gives Europe its first autonomous end-to-end access to the lunar surface, with the mission delivering cargo and building out our infrastructure and scientific capabilities on the surface of the moon in support of our own European strategic objectives,” said Daniel Neuenschwander, ESA’s director of human and robotic exploration, at a Nov. 20 press conference at ESA’s European Astronaut Centre in Cologne, Germany.
ESA in January selected Italy-based Thales Alenia Space (TAS) as the prime contractor for the lander, and today’s event unveiled the additional companies that are to design and construct Argonaut’s key systems. Thruster maker Nammo Space of the United Kingdom will build Argonaut’s main hypergolic engine and propulsion subsystems, while space systems house OHB System of Germany will engineer the lunar descent guidance, navigation and control software, plus telecommunications, power and lidar ranging equipment.
TAS also appointed two of its own offshore units. The U.K. division will be responsible for the spacecraft’s “power steering” — the reaction control system used for attitude control in 3D space, plus all the associated thruster units and propellant tanks. TAS’s French division will handle Argonaut’s real-time computing resources so that OHB System’s code achieves touchdown in one piece — and the right way up.
Rounding out the team is Arianespace, whose Ariane 64s — a variant of the Ariane 6 with four strap-on solid rocket boosters — will launch the landers toward the lunar surface.
Plans call for building five landers, the first of which ESA wants built by 2029. If all goes as planned, the first Argonaut is scheduled to arrive at the lunar south pole in 2030, which aligns with the current timeline for NASA’s Artemis V landing.
“All the international partners contribute some elements to the overall Artemis architecture, and Europe’s main contribution will be Argonaut,” Neuenschwander said.
Argonaut’s role will be to land safely and supply “food, water and air, as well as rovers, science instruments, and infrastructure for communication and power generation” to Artemis surface crews, according to ESA’s website.
Standing 6 meters high and 4.5 m in diameter, each Argonaut is designed to deliver 1,500 kilograms of critical materiel in a spacecraft whose fully-fueled mass will be just under 10,000 kg.
Neuenschwander said Thales and the other contractors are well aware of the difficulties various commercial landers have experienced. Earlier this year, for instance, the Athena lander from Intuitive Machines of Texas toppled over on landing in March, and ispace’s Resilience lander crashed during its final descent in June.
“We are very conscious of all the missions which failed or partially failed. And we will try to do a strong ‘lessons learned’ exercise while developing this mission,” said Neuenschwander. “We should not repeat a mistake somebody else has made before.”
As a result, one imperative for the design teams is that Argonaut must land in well-mapped areas with few surprises. “The reaction control system is a series of 24 thrusters that will make sure that the lander gets onto the surface of the moon with 250-meter accuracy,” said Richard Thorburn, CEO of Thales Alenia Space in the U.K.
Nammo Space, too, is striving for flight accuracy via fine-grained control of its hypergolic motor, which is fueled by mixed oxides of nitrogen and monomethylhydrazine. “The requirement for our main engine is to provide thrust throttleable to 50% and a key requirement is to allow us to provide precision landing capability,” said Rob Selby, vice president of Nammo Space.
On the landing software side, the engineers are conducting deep simulation exercises with input from companies who have either landed or crashed on the moon. “We have a thorough and stringent development cycle in front of us, with a lot of simulation involved. And we train on real data to achieve a level of simulation which is as close as possible to reality,” said Chiara Pedersoli, CEO of OHB System.
She added: “The companies who actually have either successfully or unsuccessfully landed say the actual readings they got when they were landing were a little different to what they were expecting — so we’re working together with other companies to learn lessons,” she added.
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