THE FUTURE OF MOON LANDING TECHNOLOGIES
How is Draper looking to improve and make lunar landings more routine?
Draper’s making a rather large investment of time and energy in developing technologies for landing on the Moon very precisely and very safely. That ranges from small landers all the way up to landers that would carry humans down to the surface of the Moon and also very large cargo delivery systems which would carry habitation modules down to the surface of the Moon.
The technologies apply to all of the different sizes of landers, but all have to do with landing very precisely. It will navigate to where you want to be but also detect hazards that pop up while on your final approach, which you may not have seen through imagery, avoiding those, getting you to the surface and near as possible to your desired point.
A test was recently completed over Tuscon, Arizona. Please can you tell us a bit about what was involved?
So one of the challenges of developing technologies to land on the Moon is that it’s a hard thing to do and you don’t have a test Moon you can go to and try things out. So what you try
