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Readers!

 

It is now July, time once again to celebrate the start of this webpage in 2010 with my annual July fund-raising campaign.

 

This year I celebrate the fifteenth anniversary since I began Behind the Black. During that time I have done more than 33,000 posts, mostly covering the global space industry and the related planetary and astronomical science that comes from it. Along the way I have also felt compelled as a free American citizen to regularly post my thoughts on the politics and culture of the time, partly because I think it is important for free Americans to do so, and partly because those politics and that culture have a direct impact on the future of our civilization and its on-going efforts to explore and eventually colonize the solar system.

 

You can’t understand one without understanding the other.

 

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Astrobotic’s Griffin lunar lander gets commercial rover to replace NASA’s VIPER rover

Astrobotic’s commercial Griffin lunar lander has signed a deal with the space rover startup Venturi Astrolab to fly its FLEX Lunar Innovation Platform (FLIP) in place of NASA’s cancelled VIPER rover.

Last year NASA announced that it would be cancelling the VIPER lander that was set to travel aboard Astrobotic’s Griffin-1 lander, just months after the company’s first attempt at a moonshot failed. Now, the company has secured a contract to transport a rover developed by California-based aerospace firm Venturi Astrolab. That rover, the FLEX Lunar Innovation Platform, or FLIP for short, will be deployed to the Nobile region of the lunar south pole. The mission is scheduled for the end of the year and NASA’s contract with Astrobotic has been modified for the mission to serve as large lander demonstration flight.

This deal has significant ramifications outside of Astrobotic’s effort to make money hauling payloads to the Moon. Astrolab is one of three companies with NASA design contracts to develop a manned lunar rover for its later Artemis manned missions. By flying this smaller version now and successfully operating it on the Moon Astrolab puts itself in a better position to win the larger final rover contract from NASA, beating out Intuitive Machines and Lunar Outpost.

Astrolab was clearly aiming for the VIPER slot when it unveiled FLIP in October 2024. As I predicted then:

FLIP was clearly designed to match the fit of NASA’s now canceled VIPER rover that was to be launched on Astrobotic’s Griffin lander. Griffin is still being prepped for its lunar mission to be launched in 2025, but no longer has that prime payload. It is very obvious that Astrolab is vying to make FLIP that prime payload.

Note however how private enterprise moves. NASA can’t get it done but the competition to win contracts and make profits has these private companies scrambling to make things happen, quickly and cheaply.

Genesis cover

On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.

 

The print edition can be purchased at Amazon. from any other book seller, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.


The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
 

"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News

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