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
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