Firefly Aerospace and intuitive machines belong to a group of more than a dozen private companies, competing for profitable NASA contracts to send small spacecraft to the moon. But, according to Trina Patterson, Firefly’s vice president of marketing and communications, the two managed to stay friendly in the competitive space ecosystem.
“We are very, very ‘competitive’,” Patterson said on March 11 with Josh Marshall and Intuitive Machines’ communications director Josh Marshall and NASA public affairs officer Nilufar Ramji, speaking on the SXSW group. She added: “The lunar economy cannot be accomplished by monopoly.”
Firefly and Intuitive Machines are both suppliers of NASA’s Commercial Moon Payload Services (CLPS) program, an initiative developed by the Space Agency six years ago to launch a lunar economy that bids for NASA Moon Contracts by a range of startups and founding companies. The model provides NASA with a more rash and low-cost lunar mission, which the agency sends scientific and technical experiments on spacecraft designed by CLPS suppliers.
The program hopes to start lunar commerce by creating a lunar delivery service similar to FedEx or DHL operating on Earth. In this case, NASA’s role is equivalent to the role of the customer delivering the package, fireflies and intuitive machines, etc., are used as delivery services to adopt the above package “where needed”.
CLP is always intended to be a high-risk program. “We know these companies have never landed on the moon,” Ramji said. Three of the four missions completed under the CLP have failed so far. The only successful mission is to land near the Mons Latreille, the blue ghost of the fireflies, earlier this month. NASA paid more than $100 million to Fireflies, providing a series of experiments to the region. The landers launched into orbit from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida in January (March 17), completing more than two weeks of ground operations for the agency.
After failure, the intuitive machine is supported by Fireflies
Shortly after the Firefly landed successfully, another lunar lander from the intuitive machine also attempted to contact the moon. But the spacecraft tilted as it landed and ran out of battery, cutting off the planned ten-day mission. The intuitive machine received $62.5 million from NASA to bring payloads to the moon’s surface, after its initial CLPS mission saw the company’s Lander Topple shortly after its initial CLPS mission landed on the moon.
The company said it had been backed by competitors like Firefly after its first failure. At the time, “I should hate you or love you, I’m still 50-50,” said Marshall of the Intuitive Machine. But after receiving a friendly card from its competitors, Marshall claimed they landed on the latter option.
Almost every space company can be associated with the pain of the mission. During the 2021 launch, Fireflies also developed the rocket, and its alpha rocket exploded, causing a piece of the vehicle to fall back to the ground “like a feather”. One of these works was later mailed to another CLPS contractor’s celestial body after a mission failed to reach the moon due to a valve leak. Patterson said Firefly’s message includes annotation “We know where you have been.”
He added that Firefly held a viewing party to celebrate the launch of its competitors such as its intuitive machines. “It’s hard to go to space,” he said. “It’s very difficult, you have to support each other.”
NASA’s CLP suppliers include 14 companies:
- Astronomy, headquartered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
- CERES Robotics, headquartered in Palo Alto, California.
- Draper is located in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
- Intuitive Machine, Headquartered in Houston, Texas
- Masten Space Systems, headquartered in Mojave, California.
- Track beyond, located in Edison, NJ
- SpaceX, based in Boca Chica, Texas
- Blue Origins, headquartered in Kent, Washington.
- Deep Space System, located in Littleton, Colorado.
- Firefly Aerospace, headquartered in Cedar Park, Texas
- Lockheed Martin Space is located in Denver, Colorado.
- Moon Express, located in Mountain View, California.
- Nevada Sierra Mountains, Nevada, headquartered in Reno, Nevada.
- Tyvak Nano-Satellite System, headquartered in Irving, California.
