Sherbrooke, Que.-based NGC Aerospace Ltd. is shooting for the Moon – again – after 20 years in the space business.
The company announced in late November that Firefly Aerospace will use NGC’s crater-based navigation system on a 2023 landing mission.
While the deal value was not disclosed in a press release, there is information available about the Commercial Lunar Payloads Service (CLPS) contract Firefly received from NASA. Valued at $93.3 million USD ($119.5 million CAD), Firefly’s Blue Ghost lander is tasked to deliver science payloads to Mare Crisium, which is northeast of Mare Tranquillitatis – better known to Apollo 11 landing buffs as the Sea of Tranquility.
NGC’s contract with Firefly is the third the company has signed for lunar missions, including CLPS to support NASA’s push to the Moon and the Canadian Space Agency program for lunar commercial opportunities, called Lunar Exploration Accelerator Program (LEAP).
“We already have two signed agreements for flights to the Moon with Moon Express and ispace,” NGC president Jean de Lafontaine told SpaceQ in an interview. (ispace refers to the Japanese company with that name, and not the similarly named Chinese startup called iSpace.)
Both LEAP and CLPS represent rich opportunities for small Canadian companies looking to leverage the industry trend to send payloads to the Moon for testing and operations. In NGC’s case, it got an additional boost when in October 2020, the CSA announced a contribution agreement of $840,153 for NGC to demonstrate a planetary navigation system similar to GPS technology.
NGC said the contribution agreement allows them (during development) to hire four high-time “highly qualified personnel,” which is a Canadian government term referring to employed individuals who hold at least a bachelor’s degree. Two individuals are currently on board and NGC is looking for two others. And even after the product matures, NGC expects it will continue to employ three full-time management engineers exclusively on the project.
“This contribution agreement is a really good thing – there’s new blood and new energy in the company so that we can build and grow on this on these projects,” he said.
“Of course we contribute part of it, as you know, but this is a good investment because we want to sell products in the future. We have good help from the CSA (Canadian Space Agency). [Otherwise] we might find it difficult to do it on our own, because to buy a ticket to the Moon is not cheap.”
de Lafontaine described the three contracts not only as complementary, but also as a robust business plan for his 20-person small company, if you count the two work-term students. In fact, he just flew to Dubai to attend the International Astronautical Congress there and as a result, is in early-stages discussions for a possible fourth lunar opportunity. “We’re trying to maximize the number of opportunities we will have to fly, because it’s so uncertain,” he explained.
“Some people may get to the Moon and crash on the surface,” he continued, “as some launches may fail. This is a risky business. The more opportunities we have, the highest the probability that one or more of them will make it to the Moon and successfully test our technology.”
Moon Express, he added, has not yet been awarded a CLPS mission despite being on the qualified supplier list for years. That said, de Lafontaine said many flight opportunities are still forthcoming as the Artemis program prepares for its first human landings no earlier than 2025. “We have three different kinds of opportunities that they [Moon Express] are investigating for us, but nothing concluded yet. In fact, we will have some meetings soon to advance on the decision process,” he said.
Meanwhile, ispace was selected in May to perform lunar transportation or lunar data acquisition services for three Canadian companies: Mission Control Space Services Inc., Canadensys Aerospace, and NGC.
The Tokyo-based company plans to place its Hakuto-Reboot (Hakuto-R) lander on the lunar surface in a basaltic plain, Lacus Somniorum, in 2022. (It’s called a “reboot” because “Hakuto” was the name of the ispace-managed team for the Google Lunar X-Prize that finished in 2018 with no winner; ispace, like many other X-Prize competitors, continues to work on their design nonetheless.)
An ispace press release from May explained these Canadian companies are the first three awarded contributions under CSA’s capability demonstration for the Lunar Exploration Accelerator Program (LEAP), which seeks to put Canadian lunar technology in operation, and that all three companies freely chose ispace as it met CSA technical requirements.
NGC will gather data based on crater images obtained during the Moon mission, process it through its software, and then determine the orbit of the satellite. Next, it will compare its accuracy with the actual tracking data ispace is receiving in ground control stations.
“Then we can validate that our crater-based navigation software works nicely compared to their tracking data, and one of the things that we think is our system will be more accurate than their tracking data,” de Lafontaine said, but cautioned this is based on simulations and laboratory testing, and that the real-world information will be crucial in confirming the hypothesis.
The Firefly mission, he said, will display the “highest level of validation in orbit” because the company will use NGC software to estimate in real time the position of their lander. “We will be not only a demo, but will be operational,” he explained.
Firefly will fly software similar to NGC’s on the mission as backup; the main difference is Firefly’s software tracks lunar features and NGC’s tracks craters. “They might decide during flight which one will be driving, or they might switch between the two. This remains to be determined,” de Lafontaine said.
de Lafontaine added NGC is now in touch with most of the companies that intend to fly commercially to the Moon, not only with CLPS but with other international opportunities. He noted that this pivot to lunar services was not something he could have anticipated upon founding his company in 2001, although he did point to early-stage financial support from the CSA for attitude control subsystems for satellites as very helpful even today. The money allowed them to get the technology all the way up to Technology Readiness Level 9, the top level of readiness for spaceflight that indicates system test, launch and operations in space.
“We hope the same for the Moon, and the same story will happen,” de Lafontaine said, adding that his hope is that in 20 years NGC will be continuing to sell its technology around the world – but this time, focused on missions to the Moon.