NASA Contractors Share The Grief Of Chandrayaan-2 Failure

The team was gathered in a conference room last week, about 35 in all, ready to celebrate India's triumph: the country's first lunar landing. Like many watching the livestream broadcast from the control center in Bengaluru half a world away, John Thornton, the chief executive of Astrobotic, a Pittsburgh company that is developing a moon lander of its own, was confident India would stick it, setting off celebrations across the world.

But there was silence and long faces in India's mission control, not celebration, when they lost contact with the lunar craft, and there was silence, too, in Astrobotic's conference room, as Thornton's team was reminded that the difficulties of orbital mechanics and the vacuum of space are not to be taken for granted. "Everything has to be working just right," he said. "It's like humankind against space."

Soon it will be their turn to attempt to land on the moon. Astrobotic is one of nine companies that NASA is betting on as part of a program to deliver science experiments to the surface of the moon. The list is comprised of small startups, like Thornton's venture, which grew out of Carnegie Mellon University, and industry stalwarts, such as Lockheed Martin and Draper, which provided navigation and guidance systems during the Apollo era.

NASA intends to invest $2.6 billion over 10 years in relatively small contracts - some under $100 million or so - for delivery services to the moon under a program called Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS).

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