Space Policy Edition: The ahistorical era of commercial lunar exploration

Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science

The Planetary Society

Technology, Science

4.8 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 1 March 2024

⏱️ 66 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Science historian Dr. Matt Shindell joins the show to discuss the unique era of commercial lunar exploration, and how planetary exploration has evolved and can continue to evolve on and around the Moon.

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're going to. Hello and welcome to the Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio, the monthly show where we explore
0:21.8	the politics and processes that enable space exploration.
0:26.6	I'm Casey Dreyer, the chief of space policy here at the Planetary Society. As I record this, we are only a few days into a brand new era of commercial space capability.
0:41.0	Intuitive machines, a publicly traded private company is operating hardware on the
0:47.3	lunar surface right now this hardware landed barely, but it's landed successfully, a mix of private and public payloads that are now collecting data as we speak on the surface of the moon.
1:05.7	This is all thanks to a program called Clips.
1:09.7	Commercial Lunar Payload Services, sponsored by NASA, begun about six years ago.
1:17.4	This program aims to bootstrap a new marketplace of Lunar Delivery companies that can provide ongoing services to
1:26.2	NASA and private sector and others who may want to put things on the surface of the moon. This whole endeavor is an experiment. I cannot
1:36.6	emphasize this enough. This has never happened before. And we're still very early on in this
1:42.3	experiment to see if the policy goals will work out beyond just
1:46.9	this one successful landing.
1:49.7	We've already seen another competing company, Astroatic, lose its attempted landing payload,
1:56.5	Paragreen, due to a malfunction before it even got to the moon.
2:01.2	Many other companies are years away from launching and it's not even clear if many will end up even
2:07.0	launching payloads to the moon for NASA.
2:10.0	But regardless, even if maturity and machines landing relied on pure luck and it
2:14.9	flirted with a number of near disasters, it is still now on the surface of the
2:20.1	Moon, even if it did flop over sideways, it is still operating. This is the first time in my lifetime,
2:27.2	and many of your lifetimes that we have seen a U.S. presence on the surface of the moon is truly exciting. This is truly new and what I
2:37.9	think the big takeaway here is that we are in an ahistorical moment, something without precedent,
2:46.0	something that we cannot actually look much to the past.
	...

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