Mark Megahan
Leveraging inside information he picked up as an acting NASA administrator, Steve Jurczyk is convinced that building “robotic outposts” is the key to Moon exploration. When human beings start living and working on Luna, His company, Quantum Space, aims to have internet service waiting for them to arrive. He also plans a swarm of robot helpers zipping around on lunar orbits, while “collecting data, refueling spacecraft, and assembling structures in lunar space.”
Automating tasks in Moon orbit
After retiring from NASA, Jurczyk decided to team up with three additional entrepreneurs and experts in the space industry to form Maryland based Quantum Space in 2021. As president and CEO of the startup, he declares they’ve been “focused on the Moon since NASA is also focused on returning there.” He should know.
The big project moving through the works right now is “Artemis, a massive initiative to send the first woman and the first person of color to the lunar surface.”
A series of lunar landings are already planned as NASA began “partnering with various commercial companies to send a fleet of landers and rovers to the Moon to explore the environment.”
Today’s rover versions will be a lot hipper than the one David Scott and James Irwin used for a crater buggy in 1971. Quantum Space feels there’s “an opportunity to create vehicles that could be useful in the area.”
“We know there’s going to be a lot of activity around and on the Moon in the coming decade, primarily driven by Artemis,” Jurczyk explains.
“But you know, national security — where civil spaces goes, national security will have to go also.” He’s betting heavily that “Space Force and other military entities might leverage NASA’s lunar exploration and become customers in the future.”
A robotic outpost
Some of the greatest things about robots is they don’t breath, don’t eat, and can handle extremes of temperature. A working environment ranging from -250 to +250 degrees Fahrenheit, in the vacuum of space. is a whole lot better suited to “our plastic pals who are fun to be with” than it is to humans.
Jurczyk plans to start with “a robotic outpost that could potentially help with communication in the region of space between regular Earth orbits and the Moon, known as cislunar space.”
NASA engineers already hashed out a concept for a moon-wide-web called LunaNet which “would be less reliant on Earth technologies for navigation, communication, and data relays.”
Where Jurczyk and his company come in, is to “be a node or nodes in that network, for both spacecraft in orbit as well as spacecraft on the surface.” Along with Moon communications “the outpost could also do observations of Earth or the lunar surface, as well as host payloads for collecting data on the lunar environment.”
They’re also considering bidding the contract for Space Traffic Control. The “company also envisions providing space traffic services for spacecraft traveling around the Moon.”
There are also options “to observe the climate of Earth from a unique vantage point, as well as characterize near-Earth objects like asteroids.” Another piece of orbital real estate they’re eyeing up is the “Earth-Moon Lagrange point” L1. That’s where “the gravity and centripetal forces between the two bodies are just right for spacecraft to remain relatively stable.“
