NASA Hires Firefly Aerospace to Build a Drone Aircraft Carrier -- to the Moon
Firefly just became an important part of NASA's Project Artemis.
NASA Hires Firefly Aerospace to Build a Drone Aircraft Carrier -- to the Moon
Overview
NASA's Moon Base plans are shifting into high gear. As part of a wide-ranging "update on Moon Base rovers, landers, missions" last month, NASA announced a novel plan for mapping the Moon's surface -- and it involves Firefly Aerospace (NASDAQ: FLY), the first American company to land a spacecraft on the Moon (upright) in the past 50 years. Here's how it's going to work.
Image source: Firefly Aerospace.
It sounds a bit like a James Bond movie title, but NASA has dubbed its latest lunar project "MoonFall." Launching atop an as-yet-unidentified carrier rocket sometime in 2028, Firefly Aerospace will send one of its Elytra Dark spacecraft (the largest and most capable of the Elytra versions) to the Moon. Its cargo: four 550-pound, 7-foot-wide, 4-foot-tall "hopping" drones built for NASA by CalTech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). Thirty miles above the lunar surface, Elytra will deploy its cargo to descend independently to the Moon. (Elytra itself will remain in lunar orbit.)
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Originally published at www.fool.com.
