More than 50 years after the Apollo mission landed the last American aircraft on the surface of the moon, Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic is attempting to repeat the same feat with one big distinction — becoming the first commercial space company to achieve a lunar landing.
"To crack the nut of the moon, we need the infrastructure and resources to begin to start to work," Thornton said. "The more we can remove our tether of reliance on earth’s resources and we travel into space, the more we become true space explorers and ultimately space settlers." "You have to build a spacecraft that can fly for up to a month or more at a time through space, get out to the moon, drop into lunar orbit, and then descend for a soft landing down on the surface," Thornton said. "It’s extremely difficult to string all those series of successes together in a single spacecraft that can then deliver a business model."The goal of establishing a long-term human presence on the moon has gained momentum in recent weeks.
"As the costs come down, as we're able to use more in-space resources, there could become a point where the costs become affordable enough that you can potentially [see the development of] the very first hotels on the moon," Thornton said. "[The lunar surface] could be how we refuel our spacecraft to go to Mars and other deep space destinations. It all starts right here with our nearest neighbor, the moon.