Europe will have to be more Tenacious to land its first rover on the moon

Europe has probably undergone a setback in its attempt to reach another important step in the commercial race to use lunar resources. Tenacious, which was to become the first European manufacturing rover to land on the moon, was aboard a theur who lost contact during her attempt to land – a strong sign This something has been wrong.

If it were confirmed, it would be the second failed mission of the Hakuto-R commercial lunar exploration program, two years later A previous crash that had already broken the hopes.

This loss will be particularly felt in Japan; Ispacethe company behind Hakuto-R and the missing currently Resilience arborescence who was tenacious, is a publicly listed Japanese company. But it is also a hard blow for Europe: the European Space Agency (ESA) supported the mission; And the rover was designed, assembled, tested and manufactured by Ispace-Europe outside Luxembourg.

Luxembourg is not only the Ispace -Europe base – this is the reason why the entity was created in 2017. Spaceresources.lu Initiative, the small country has become the second in the world after the United States to adopt a law giving companies the right to have resources extracted from space.

If operators based on tenacious Luxembourg had managed to drive it on the moon, the rover would have captured the video and collected data. One of his missions would have been to collect the lunar soil, called Régolith, as part of a Contract with NASAto which he was supposed to transfer the property of the samples.

“I think it will be very useful to nail what it means to market spatial resources and how to do it on a larger scale, both in terms of volume and global participation and coordination,” said the CEO of Ispace-Europe, Julien Lamamy, in Techcrunch on the eve of the landing attempt.

Winning such a NASA contract was also a first for a European company. But it took a little cajole for Lamamy to boast of the agile team of 50 people of 30 nationalities that made this unique little rover.

Despite a curriculum vitae which includes time at the NASA jet and MIT jet laboratory, Lamamy is not the type to boast. In our conversation, he admitted that he had to “channel his American interior” to explain the achievements of his team. But it is also because ISPACE is deliberately collaborative.

For example, the light scoop that was to collect the regolith for NASA was manufactured by EpirocA supplier of mining equipment in Sweden. “We could have done it ourselves. Instead, we saw the opportunity to hire a terrestrial industry to think about space,” said Lamamy. “The more people participate, the better.”

More and more people are also participating in the Luxembourg space ecosystem. The Luxembourg Space Agency (LSA) was created in 2018 and the country actively supports the sector, which has passed from a niche to the dominant current since the adoption of the spatial resources law.

“Even better than that, many companies are now established downstream of the ISPACE in the value chain,” said Lamamy. He cited the example of Maha Pietraa startup partnership With the ISPACE on Helium-3 mining, a rarefied resource, of the lunar surface.

“Our ambition is to develop a space sector which is very integrated into our industries on Earth and opens up new market opportunities, both in space and on earth”, the Minister of the Economy, SMEs and Tourism in Luxembourg, Lex Delles, said in a comment When Ispace-Europe announced the completion of its rover.

This ambition is fueled by money. Tenacious was developed with the co -financing of the LSA via an ESA contract with Luxembourg National Space Program, Luxury. Tax incentives or direct aids are available both for startups and for multinational companies, according to Deloitte research on the Luxembourg space industry.

An unusual payload

Tenacious was designed to be both small and light, weighing about five kilograms – half the weight of the NASA Sojourner Mars Rover. By selecting mass components and mass economical, explained Lamamy, his team was able to build a very small system which is cheaper to manufacture and send on the moon. This made its payload intrinsically limited, but designed to reach up to a kilogram.

As part of the resilience mission, the tenacious payload included the scoop required for the NASA mission, and perhaps unexpectedly, a miniature red house. Known as The moon houseThis little sculpture of a Swedish chalet had to symbolically become the first house on the moon, a project that artist Mikael Genberg continued Since 1999.

“It is not a question of science or politics, it is a question of reminding us what we all share – our humanity, our imagination and our desire for a house. A red house looking at” The pale Blue Dot “, as Carl Sagan said once our planet fragile”, indicated the site of the Moon House.

The Lamamy team had prepared to be in charge of dropping and successfully photographed and photographed the moon house in the right place and took the role seriously. As part of the Rover tests, he carried out on earth, both on his Luxembourg test site and in Several European locationsIncluding the Spanish Canary Islands, the operators had repeated the procedure several times.

Although poetic, it may have seemed less priority for NASA, but not for lamamia. “It is an interesting paradigm change; Yes, we are going to the moon to improve our knowledge of the moon from a scientific and commercial point of view, but we are also there to be open to artists, entrepreneurs, educators, and it is also a very exciting element to the mission. “

Unfortunately, this will probably have to wait.