DARPA picks 14 companies for lunar architecture study

WASHINGTON — DARPA has selected 14 companies, ranging from small startups to established aerospace corporations, to participate in a study on developing commercial lunar infrastructure.

DARPA announced Dec. 5 that 14 companies will collaborate over the next seven months on its 10-Year Lunar Architecture, or LunA-10, study. The goal of the effort, announced in August, is to develop an integrated architecture to support a commercial lunar economy by the mid-2030s.

“LunA-10 has the potential to upend how the civil space community thinks about spurring widespread commercial activity on and around the Moon within the next 10 years,” Michael Nayak, DARPA program manager for LunA-10, said in a statement.

The 14 companies selected are:

• Blue Origin
• CisLunar Industries
• Crescent Space Services LLC
• Fibertek, Inc.
• Firefly Aerospace
• GITAI
• Helios
• Honeybee Robotics
• ICON
• Nokia of America
• Northrop Grumman
• Redwire Corporation
• Sierra Space
• SpaceX

The companies, Nayak said in a statement, each offered “a clear vision and technically rigorous plan for advancing quickly towards our goal: a self-sustaining, monetizable, commercially owned-and-operated lunar infrastructure.”