Private mission to Apophis gets another customer, two student-built landers
A cartoon (not to scale) showing Apophis’s
path in 2029.
The orbital tug startup Exlabs has signed up a second payload customer to fly on its private ApophisExL mission to rendezvous with the potentially dangerous asteroid Apophis when it makes its April 13, 2029 close fly-by of the Earth.
ExLabs has announced its partnership with Japan’s Chiba Institute of Technology (ChibaTech) and its Planetary Exploration Research Center (PERC) to send university-led payloads to the surface of asteroid Apophis during its rare near-Earth flyby in 2029. ApophisExL is the world’s first commercial deep-space rideshare and is supported by mission design and operations collaboration with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) operated by Caltech.
Under the leadership of planetary scientist and PERC Director, Dr. Tomoko Arai, ChibaTech students and researchers are developing two landing payloads to be deployed on the asteroid’s surface.
An Australian satellite startup, Fleet Space Technologies, had already signed on to fly a mapping instrument on ApophisExL.
Though the press release at the link calls this private mission “a new model,” using private enterprise rather than relying on the government for doing planetary missions, it actually harks back to the way things were done in the U.S. before World War II, when the private sector did most of this pure research. In fact, as late as the 1960s there was at least one company, American Science and Engineering, doing the first X-ray astronomical observations flying suborbital rockets. It later won contracts from NASA and other agencies to help build several later orbiting X-ray telescopes.
Over time the government space agencies became dominant, so that most of this design work was either done by them or by universities, with private companies relegated to the roles of minor subcontractors.
This new model is simply an extension of the capitalism model that is taking over the entire space industry, shifting power and ownership from big, expensive, and inefficient government programs to small, cheap, and economical private missions. Those space agencies can still do missions, but they do it by buying payload space on these private missions.
Below is a list of the missions going to Apophis in 2029:
» Read more
A cartoon (not to scale) showing Apophis’s
path in 2029.
The orbital tug startup Exlabs has signed up a second payload customer to fly on its private ApophisExL mission to rendezvous with the potentially dangerous asteroid Apophis when it makes its April 13, 2029 close fly-by of the Earth.
ExLabs has announced its partnership with Japan’s Chiba Institute of Technology (ChibaTech) and its Planetary Exploration Research Center (PERC) to send university-led payloads to the surface of asteroid Apophis during its rare near-Earth flyby in 2029. ApophisExL is the world’s first commercial deep-space rideshare and is supported by mission design and operations collaboration with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) operated by Caltech.
Under the leadership of planetary scientist and PERC Director, Dr. Tomoko Arai, ChibaTech students and researchers are developing two landing payloads to be deployed on the asteroid’s surface.
An Australian satellite startup, Fleet Space Technologies, had already signed on to fly a mapping instrument on ApophisExL.
Though the press release at the link calls this private mission “a new model,” using private enterprise rather than relying on the government for doing planetary missions, it actually harks back to the way things were done in the U.S. before World War II, when the private sector did most of this pure research. In fact, as late as the 1960s there was at least one company, American Science and Engineering, doing the first X-ray astronomical observations flying suborbital rockets. It later won contracts from NASA and other agencies to help build several later orbiting X-ray telescopes.
Over time the government space agencies became dominant, so that most of this design work was either done by them or by universities, with private companies relegated to the roles of minor subcontractors.
This new model is simply an extension of the capitalism model that is taking over the entire space industry, shifting power and ownership from big, expensive, and inefficient government programs to small, cheap, and economical private missions. Those space agencies can still do missions, but they do it by buying payload space on these private missions.
Below is a list of the missions going to Apophis in 2029:
» Read more
