San Antonio space startup teaming with Colorado firms on moon missions
A Port San Antonio-based space startup is joining forces with two Colorado companies to develop technologies for future NASA moon missions.
Astroport Space Technologies, a subsidiary of Exploration Architecture, or XArc, announced the new partnerships with Orbit Fab Inc. and ispace technologies U.S. Inc. during the 75th International Astronautical Congress taking place this week in Milan.
Sam Ximenes, founder and CEO of Astroport and XArc, called the collaborations "a significant step forward in our mission to establish a sustainable human presence on the moon."
Astroport, which envisions using lunar soil or regolith for construction on the moon, has seen steady growth since launching in 2020. It's received NASA small-business and tech transfer grants three years in a row, employs 15 people and has offices in Midland, Luxembourg and Australia.
"The Orbit Fab deal represents our first commercial customer for lunar construction services and logistical supply," he said via email Thursday. "Something akin to building a private landing facility for a commercial customer."
He said construction of such a lunar facility likely would be a public-private partnership with the goal of providing services to NASA.
"Our vision has always been to be an operator of the landing pads that we build." he said. "And just like San Antonio, well known for its MRO (maintenance, repair and overhaul) depot facilities, this is the same purpose of an astroport, as well as providing logistical support for explorers and entrepreneurs setting up operations for mining lunar resources."
Ximenes envisions fleets of autonomous robots using molten lunar soil and 3D printing to build roads, structures, landing pads and a spacecraft refueling supply chain on the moon.
"Of course, this is all a long way into the future, maybe a decade away, so in the meantime the collaboration will be developing, demonstrating and maturing the technologies needed to make it all happen," he said.
His company and Orbit Fab, a spacecraft manufacturer in Lafayette, Colo., will work together on developing the needed lunar infrastructure as well as in-space refueling capabilities. They also plan to have joint demo missions of the new technologies.
He said Astroport's technologies that extract and use resources from the moon will work well with Orbit Fab's in-space refueling capabilities and could "create the foundation for a thriving lunar economy."
Daniel Faber, Orbit Fab's CEO, said the partnership could help "unlock the opportunities that the Moon offers for scientific discovery, economic development, and human advancement."
Astroport is joining up with iSpace-U.S., a lunar lander company based in Englewood, Colo., for a ride to the moon's surface. The company's APEX 1.0 lander could someday carry Astroport's scientific instruments to the moon.
The data the instruments collect will help scientists better understand how to build on the moon, Ximenes said.
In November, Astroport received $1.3 million in NASA funding to continue its work as part of the $93 billion Artemis program that aims to build a moon base and eventually send people to Mars.
The space agency invested in Astroport's "Lunatron" furnace-nozzle that makes bricks from lunar soil, its "Surveyorbot" that will measure soil composition and depth of bedrock, and a "concept of operations" about how it will build spacecraft launch and landing pads on the moon's surface.
Astroport also has a ticket to the moon aboard a SpaceX Starship. The company is developing a "sieving and grain separation" instrument for the Flexible Logistics and Exploration, or FLEX, rover.
Hawthorne, Calif.-based Astrolab is leading that program, dubbed Mission 1. It's currently slated to fly in mid-2026.
Astroport's instruments aren't the only San Antonio-built hardware headed to the moon. Southwest Research Institute's Lunar Magnetotelluric Sounder is headed to the Moon aboard Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost lunar lander. That mission is set to blast off later this year or early 2025 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Florida.
This story was originally published October 17, 2024, 6:47 PM.
