Lunar Outpost’s second prototype, Falcon, on the company’s test range. Credit: Amanda Miller
RYE, COLORADO — Tire tracks crisscross the loose, gray dirt of a cattle ranch that serves as the test site of Lunar Outpost, an aerospace startup that hopes to one day leave tracks on another rocky surface as part of NASA’s Artemis moon program.
Lunar Outpost is one of three multi-company teams vying to provide the Lunar Terrain Vehicle, or LTV, for crewed lunar expeditions and robotic tasks in between. To that end, NASA last year awarded the companies an unspecified amount to conduct feasibility studies, with the intent of selecting one provider for a services contract. All together, NASA said it plans to spend up to $4.6 billion on LTV studies and operations.
The challenge before Lunar Outpost and its competitors? Design and build an LTV that goes beyond the capabilities of the Apollo-era Lunar Roving Vehicle. In addition to providing mobility and acting as a work hub for astronauts, these next-generation moon buggies must “telerobotically perform science, exploration, and logistics” while no astronauts are present; feature a robotic arm; and operate for at least 10 years in the harsh environment characterized by large temperature variations and the tiny-but-sharp, pervasive particles that make up the moon’s regolith, or dirt.
If plans hold, the chosen LTV would make its debut during the Artemis V mission, currently scheduled for 2030 — though that doesn’t take into account any changes the Trump administration might direct NASA to make. The agency expects to award “a demonstration mission task order” by the end of the year, a spokesperson told me by email, “that will result in the development, delivery, and demonstration of an LTV on the Moon.” In the event of a disappointment, Lunar Outpost intends to continue developing its vehicle and to pursue other customers, a company spokesperson told me.
Meanwhile, the company is carrying on with its effort to build seven more full-size prototypes to incrementally test newer aspects of the design, for a total of nine. The tenth vehicle — fittingly dubbed Eagle — would be the first to go to the moon.
CEO Justin Cyrus founded Lunar Outpost with his brother Julian, the chief operating officer and a fellow engineer; Forrest Meyen, a veteran of Mars missions who serves as chief strategy officer; and AJ Gemer, the chief technology officer who is an engineer with a background in aircraft design and also specializes in dust. They invited a handful of reporters to view Lunar Outpost’s mission control facility Aug. 18, including a remote demonstration with Raven, the first of two full-size LTV prototypes the company has tested in recent years to refine the design and operations of the Eagle.
Just as future mission controllers might, we observed Raven’s surroundings through the vehicle’s cameras, broadcasted back to us some 200 kilometers away in mission control in Arvada. Inside this unassuming building, a handful of staff members performed tasks at computers displaying a blocky purple-and-yellow map of the terrain, generated onboard the LTV and transmitted via Starlink satellite internet, Cyrus said. Purple indicates traversable areas and yellow nontraversable.
The crew for the demonstration comprised a flight director to call the shots, a “Stargate officer” in charge of the company’s mission control software, a flight engineer monitoring the LTV’s condition, a pilot sending the commands, and an avionics officer ensuring that the rover’s computer “is on and talking to us and is capable of doing what it needs to do,” Cyrus said. The flight director called out waypoints, transmitted to the rover in the form of commands to carry out low-risk maneuvers, such as moving across flat ground from one waypoint to the next and traversing a small crater.
The next day, we visited the test range itself, located on land owned by the Cyrus family. It affords about a square kilometer to drive the vehicles over, including steep grades to climb and cliffs to avoid, along with a 100-meter-by-100-meter field of simulated craters and obstacles. Lunar Outpost curated the field to include some traversable terrain, along with obstacles, including the meter-high piles of rock that employees brought over from another part of the ranch, Julian Cyrus told me during a tour in an off-roading ATV.
Even that ATV once served as an LTV test vehicle, he said. The staff built a “superstructure” to attach to the ATV that matched the LTV’s dimensions in order to start testing the placement of cameras and lidar equipment before building the first full-size prototype. Parked next to a normal car, the LTV is noticeably wider.
As for any other similarities, I got to gauge those for myself during a ride in Raven. I climbed into the passenger seat and, with a Lunar Outpost staffer at the joystick, we made a short loop, traversing craters and avoiding obstacles in an experience not unlike that of riding in a slow-moving boat, swaying and rocking in a gentle wake. That motion reflects the “travel,” or vertical distance, in the vehicle’s suspension that compensates for the fact that LTVs are meant to drive a lot faster — up to 25 kilometers per hour — than their predecessors, Justin Cyrus told the group. According to the company’s modeling, hitting a rock at top speed could evoke “a pretty dramatic response.”
The travel in the suspension “is pretty massive for that reason,” he said. “You don’t want that impact making the driver either uncomfortable or making the vehicle harder to control.”
The gray dirt and jagged rock of the test site isn’t “geotechnically accurate regolith like we do with some of our other testing that’s done in a vacuum” for a better simulation of the lunar environment, he added. Nevertheless, the ranch represents one of the company’s “most informative” LTV test sites “because we can test large-scale vehicles for long periods of time — and we can test the autonomy, and we can test the human interface and interaction.”
By contrast, limited testing in the relatively small rock yard or a paved parking lot at one of the offices in town “doesn’t really get you all that you need,” Julian Cyrus said — “especially just the amount of time. Not just the landscape, the going over difficult terrain, but going over difficult terrain that you haven’t planned for.”
“It’s something that we really need to test thoroughly because our vehicles are going to be up on the moon for years and years at a time.”
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