History
The team articulated an ambitious goal from the start in 2008: they hope to be the first to land their spacecraft "Red Rover" on the Moon, using the lander, named "Artemis Lander". Since its formation, Astrobotic has maintained a spot in the top three rankings for Evadot's third-party Google Lunar X Prize Scorecard. The company's first running prototype of Red Rover was completed the same year, and on July 28, 2008, NASA awarded Astrobotic funding for its "Regolith Moving Methods" proposal.
In 2009, Astrobotic began to receive a series of Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) funding from NASA totaling over $795,000 to investigate prospecting for lunar resources.
On October 15, 2010, NASA awarded a contract to Astrobotic for Innovative Lunar Demonstrations Data (ILDD) firm-fixed price indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contracts with a total value up to $30.1 million over a period of up to five years, and in December, NASA's $500,000 ILDD project for further Lunar Demonstrations Data was awarded to Astrobotic.
As of February 2011, both the descent stage and the lunar rover are now unnamed. Originally named "Red Rover" and "Artemis Lander," respectively, Astrobotic indicated in 2011 that they were reserving naming rights, as well as selection of the planned location for the lunar landing, for their payload customers. "We have to sell a lot of payload to make the economics work, ... the customers will decide where we go." Later, the rover continued to be called "Red Rover" and the lander was now called "Griffin."
Astrobotic reserved a SpaceX Falcon 9 launch vehicle in 2011 for an October 2015 launch. Additionally, Astrobotic's "Technologies Enabling Exploration of Skylights, Lava Tubes and Caves," was a phase one selection for NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC). In April 2011, Astrobotic received a $599,000 two-year contract to develop a scalable gravity offload device for testing rover mobility in simulated lunar gravity under NASA's Small Business Technology Transfer Program (STTR).
In May 2012, David Gump left the position of President of Astrobotic and John Thornton took the reins.
Read more about this topic: Astrobotic Technology
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“I think that Richard Nixon will go down in history as a true folk hero, who struck a vital blow to the whole diseased concept of the revered image and gave the American virtue of irreverence and skepticism back to the people.”
—William Burroughs (b. 1914)
“The view of Jerusalem is the history of the world; it is more, it is the history of earth and of heaven.”
—Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881)
“Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today.... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)