Moon News: A Robot Excavator, Water on the Moon, and Likely Changes to the Artemis Program

NASA wants to use what it finds on the Moon to support humans living there. That means creating the technology to mine the regolith for materials to build infrastructure and find life-supporting water and oxygen.

Lunar Bulldozer-Dump Truck Combo Being Built For Artemis

In pursuit of the former, NASA has recently announced the development of a moon-mining robot called IPEx (In-situ Resource Utilization Pilot Excavator). As seen below, IPEx is a combination of a bulldozer and dump truck.

The design includes rotating, hollow cylinders and bucket drums that act as scoops. The latter will dig up the regolith. The drums are designed to rotate as they are filled by the bucket drums. The robot is being designed to handle up to 10,000 kilograms (22,000 pounds) of regolith per day. Not only will the regolith IPEx collects provide construction material for a future lunar settlement, but it also will be mined for oxygen and other useful elements. The oxygen is critical for both life support and chemical rocket fuel.

Eugene Schwanbeck is NASA’s IPEx Program Manager. He describes the technology stating:

“The innovative design of counter-rotating bucket drums, which dig simultaneously in opposing directions, enables IPEx to maintain a low mass while efficiently addressing the challenges of reduced gravity excavation.”

The robot is designed to run autonomously and is capable of navigating over lunar terrain in variable lighting conditions and in the Moon’s environment where temperature swings are significantly greater than anything experienced on Earth. Lunar days and nights are 14 Earth days long. Temperatures swing from 120 Celsius (250 Fahrenheit) during the day to as low as -250 Celsius (-410 Fahrenheit) in deep craters during the lunar night.

A flight-ready version of IPEx is expected to be finished in 2027. The deployment will follow sometime between 2027 and 2030. If it works well on the Moon, future iterations of IPEx will be used for mining the regolith of Mars.

Finding The Moon’s Hidden Water

NASA doesn’t want to have to bring everything from Earth needed to create a habitable permanent facility on the Moon. Critical to this strategy is ISRU (In-situ resource utilization). Finding water on the Moon is key to the NASA plan.

Water exists on the Moon. The key is where to find it in sufficient quantity for harvesting. Since the first Moon rocks came back from the Apollo missions, NASA has known the Moon’s rocks are wet. Water molecules are bound in the regolith which when heated release water vapour. IPEx, when it scoops up lunar regolith can become one way to find water with concentrations from 100 to 400 parts per million found embedded in mineral grains and volcanic glasses.

An overt water source that would readily be more available is surface and subsurface water in the form of ice found in permanently shadowed regions at the Moon’s poles as seen in the picture below.

The estimated size of areas that could be harvested for this type of water covers 40,000 square kilometres (15,444 square miles) near the Moon’s South Pole. That is why the Artemis Program plans to land there to establish the first permanent lunar habitat.

Lunar water will be used for life support, hydroponic cultivation, oxygen production, rocket fuel, radiation shielding and industrial applications. Every ton harvested on the Moon means payloads from Earth can bring other essential materials to support a permanent human presence there.

Is The Artemis Program About To Be Rethought?

NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) has been flown once, in November 2022. The mission tested the rocket and the Orion space capsule with no crew aboard. The estimated cost for the test launch was $4.1 billion. The next Artemis mission, number 2, will cost easily as much and has been delayed by at least one year because of heat shield problems experienced by Orion in its first flight reentry.

The total cost of Artemis through this year is expected to approach $93 billion with $23.8 billion accounting for the SLS. Are these numbers sustainable for lunar exploration? Many in the United States think not. Among them is Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX and Donald Trump’s head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) which is mandated to find cost savings in the operation of the federal government.

SLS versions are called blocks. Block 1 flew in 2022 and will fly in both Artemis 2 and 3, the latter will be the first human crew mission to the lunar surface since Apollo. Later missions will use Block 1B. None of these SLS rockets will be reusable. Orion is designed for reuse but who knows if, in the end, it will prove that capability.

Back in 2019, I asked the question: When Will NASA Abandon the SLS Project? Now it appears that Boeing, the key contractor for the SLS is sensing the winds of change in Washington and has warned 400 of its employees that they may face layoffs beginning in
April 2025. With Elon Musk’s Starship and his influence with Trump on finding savings, SLS could find itself proverbially “lost in space.” If SpaceX can iron out the design flaw that caused the latest Starship to explode during a test flight, its reusability, capacity and lower cost, would make it a substitute for Artemis missions.

SpaceX is already contracted by NASA to fly an adapted Starship called the Human Landing System (HLS) during the Artemis 3 mission. If Starship proves itself in repeated tests this year, it could be bringing astronauts to the Moon on flights directly from Earth. The Lunar Gateway project could be repurposed or abandoned saving billions more.

NASA’s mission to return to the Moon may look very different before the end of this year. Musk has even suggested there is no need to return to the Moon and that Artemis should be redirected to put humans on the surface of Mars before the end of the decade. At least two optimal windows for flights to Mars should occur before 2030.