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Advanced Space Orbits the Moon
John Himes
April 1st, 2024
Someone always has to raise their hand to go first. Someone has to blaze a trail to the Moon, and that someone must want to do so not because it is easy, but because it is hard.
That’s why Advanced Space, a Colorado aerospace company, volunteered to pioneer a challenging lunar orbit on behalf of NASA’s Artemis program.
The end goal of these missions goes beyond sending Americans back to the Moon. The goal is to establish a long-term presence on the Moon and prepare the way for exploration and settlement of Mars and beyond.
Navigating orbits is a key part of this puzzle. Someone needs to demonstrate how to maneuver into and operate within the lunar near-rectilinear halo orbit (NRHO) because that’s where the Gateway space station is going to fly. Not only will this station serve as a basecamp for astronauts visiting the Moon, it will serve as a waypoint for humans to access deep space.
Advanced Space’s CAPSTONE satellite is the first spacecraft to fly in an NRHO and the first commercial satellite to orbit the Moon. Now they’re gathering valuable information about navigation and communications to support advanced infrastructure for the future of the lunar economy.
“Getting to the Moon is an incredible experience,” says Bradley Cheetham, CEO and cofounder of Advanced Space. “People dream of this as a career aspiration, and many see it as the end. But we see it as the beginning. We are going so much further.”
Advanced Space launches a company
In 2011, Cheetham and his cofounders felt a call that’s all too familiar to every wayfinder. They turned their gazes up from the horizon and toward the stars. They set out to explore, develop, and settle outer space.
The problem was that this wasn’t exactly in vogue at the time. “There were no other companies with that purpose,” explains Cheetham. “So, we decided to start our own.”
They saw an opportunity. “We decided to create an innovative company, a company that will push the state of the art in exciting new ways,” says Dr. Jeffrey Parker, Advanced Space’s CTO and cofounder.
But unlike larger companies, they didn’t have billions of dollars to throw around. They couldn’t follow Musk and Bezos’ example. They could, however, build orbits and software.
A cosmic perspective
Compared to most hardware-centric aerospace companies, their startup costs were much lower. They didn’t have to make a big investment in a factory. Nonetheless, they still felt the pressure to raise money and find an investor.
“At the last minute, that investment fell through,” recounts Cheetham. “So, either we just failed right out the gate, or we pivoted to bootstrapping and growing based on customer demand. The beauty of that is that we now have total control over our destiny and our priorities.”
Losing that investor turned out to be a blessing in disguise.
Instead of focusing on maximizing shareholder returns or quarterly earnings, Advanced Space operates on a larger time horizon. “Settling space is not a next-quarter, next-year, or next-decade thing,” says Cheetham. That’s why the company functions on a generational timeline.
This is the era when the paradigm changes for humans in space. The company envisions a world where tomorrow’s children will never know a time when people weren’t living on the Moon or exploring deep space.
They’re making good progress. After 13 years in business, they’ve supported the exploration of Mars, Venus, asteroids, and the outer planets; they’ve supported the development of the Moon into an economy; they are actively investing in establishing infrastructure to settle the Moon. “We are devoted to our people and our community as we aim high,” concludes Dr. Parker.
Missions by Advanced Space
It’s time for the fun stuff. Let’s talk about spacecraft!
In the early days of the company, the team’s mission-enabling services helped clients get to some very exciting places.
One of Advanced Space’s first major programs was supporting an innovative mission to Mars that has yielded new discoveries and advanced technology here and at Mars. This mission involved a close collaboration with the Laboratory for Atmosphere and Space Physics (LASP) at the University of Colorado (CU) Boulder.
The Advanced Space team’s technical expertise also enabled new launch vehicle development programs and low Earth orbit mega-constellation deployment for NASA and the Air Force.
CAPSTONE
Advanced Space’s Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment (CAPSTONE™) for NASA represents another major milestone. This satellite launched on June 28, 2022, entered lunar orbit on November 18 of the same year, and has continued operating ever since.
Advanced Space is the prime contractor on this CubeSat, a microwave-sized satellite equipped with a specially designed propulsion system, a bevy of communications arrays, and a chip-scale atomic clock.
CAPSTONE’s goals are twofold.
First, it’s trailblazing a path. It’s gathering information about how to enter and operate in the attractive NRHO around the Moon. Because of the orbit’s halo shape, spacecraft in the NRHO never go behind the Moon as viewed from Earth. This is excellent for communication needs, particularly to relay data from surface activities to ground support.
Advanced Space also plotted a path for the NRHO so that the Earth never moves between the spacecraft and the Sun, thus maintaining continuous power via the onboard solar panels and reducing total costs. Any innovation that reduces cost helps support all such missions.
Second, it’s testing a suite of communications technologies, including both Earth-to-satellite communications and peer-to-peer communications between lunar orbiters. The atomic clock is a key part of this equation. On May 10, 2023, CAPSTONE made the first crosslink communication with NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), demonstrating how spacecraft can navigate each other without ground infrastructure.
Confirming the viability of these technologies is crucial to cislunar space situational awareness (knowing where other objects are in space), sharing realtime data between satellites, and enabling navigation with a lunar analog to GPS. This makes CAPSTONE an important step in the Artemis mission’s goal to create a human outpost on the Moon.
The mission control team at Advanced Space had to overcome a series of major “anomalies” to get this far. From unsettling radio silence to a jammed open thruster valve causing uncontrollable spin, Advanced Space and the CAPSTONE mission partners have maneuvered through challenging situations to overcome the odds and keep their spacecraft alive.
“Those are moments I’ll never forget,” says Cheetham with a smile.
CAPSTONE continues to operate, yielding more experience to support the future Gateway; it also continues to be a proving ground for advanced communications and navigation strategies to support future infrastructure in cislunar space. The spacecraft provides valuable insights for NASA and the larger aerospace community.Oracle
Advanced Space’s next mission to the Moon is Oracle, a collaboration with the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL).
“This spacecraft will focus on space situational awareness in the Earth-Moon corridor,” says Meredith Beveridge, Director of Programs and leader of the Oracle mission. “It has an optical payload and is roughly the size of a refrigerator.”
Not only is Oracle bigger than CAPSTONE, but it’s also much more complex. The mission has more objectives, more resources, and more stakeholders.
It will build upon the lessons learned from CAPSTONE and is scheduled to launch in the next few years.
Beyond the Moon
In keeping with the company’s mission to explore the farthest reaches of the solar system and beyond, Advanced Space is also working on a set of missions that go well beyond Earth’s gravitational field.
ESCAPADE, NASA’s Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers,is the company’s next mission they are supporting to Mars. It includes “a pair of satellites that are nimble and responsive to fly,” according to Dr. Parker. “A typical mission to Mars costs between $300M to $1B for orbiters. The ESCAPADE mission led by UC Berkeley is putting two up for $55M.”
CAPSTONE and ESCAPADE have many parallels. They have furthered the state of the art for low-cost missions and tested the limits of our innovation.
Whereas CAPSTONE’s focus is on the infrastructure on the Moon, ESCAPADE’s objectives are focused on science. The mission’s science depends on multiple spacecraft studying different regions of the Martian environment simultaneously. ESCAPADE is able to unlock the mysteries of the interactions between the Sun and Mars, as one spacecraft can measure the pristine environment that Mars is exposed to and the other spacecraft can measure Mars’ reaction to it.
It is theorized that solar wind stripped Mars of its atmosphere via several physical mechanisms. ESCAPADE will test these conjectures and provide insight into our solar system’s evolution.
ESCAPADE is set to launch in September 2024.
Finally, Advanced Space is also preparing for a mission to the solar system’s main asteroid belt—a mission that will send a spacecraft over three billion miles to explore seven or more main-belt asteroids, including a long exploration of one object: the asteroid Justitia.
Justitia is one of the reddest asteroids in the solar system, and it is very large, measuring over 33 miles wide.
This mission will unlock many secrets of the asteroids, even leading to an understanding of what resources may be utilized in the future. It is an international mission, and Advanced Space works closely with a wide variety of team members, including the United Arab Emirates and LASP. The mission will launch in March 2028.
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Advanced Space’s innovative technologies
Most software companies get the luxury of pushing out minimum viable products, figuring out what’s not working, and issuing updates and patches at will. Spacecraft software engineering is a whole different ball game.
“Space is hard, and cislunar space is harder,” explains Cheetham. “Any problems you might have close to Earth are compounded as you get further away. The hardest part is that you don’t get a second chance.”
As they develop onboard navigation algorithms, communications systems, and other innovative applications, the team at Advanced Space needs to take a rigorous approach. Once the spacecraft launches, they’ll never get to touch it again.
These are some of the innovations the company has delivered to orbit.
Flight dynamics: Missions, navigation, and orbits
This technology is as much about physics as it is about developing robust, fault-tolerant code. It involves mapping routes through space and building applications that enable spacecraft to autonomously maneuver through them by continuously tracking their positioning and speed.
Basically, if someone needs help steering their spacecraft, Advanced Space will design a turnkey mission for them to fly.
This expertise is a fundamental differentiator for the company. Dr. Parker, the company’s CTO, earned his PhD in aerospace engineering by focusing on lunar transfers.
Advanced Space’s hallmark trajectory is called a BLT. “Everyone loves BLTs,” laughs Dr. Parker. Only this BLT has nothing to do with bacon.
The acronym stands for ballistic lunar transfer, which is a unique way to get from Earth to the Moon’s near-rectilinear halo orbit (NRHO). Basically, it shoots the spacecraft out 1–2 million kilometers away and then combines the gravitational pull from the Sun, Earth, and the Moon to slingshot the spacecraft back around toward the Moon.
CAPSTONE used a BLT to enter an NRHO orbit around the Moon. NASA and others have used BLTs in the past.
BLTs are attractive for uncrewed missions because they use less fuel to deliver more mass than direct lunar transfers. Dr. Parker should know, as he is recognized in the industry for the book he wrote on the subject.
Automation and integration
Another area of innovation is software that takes manual processes, automates them, and improves scalability.
“People can optimize flying a single satellite on their computer,” explains Cheetham. “But if you want to fly 1,000, there’s just not enough people to do it manually. So, you need to get scale and build autonomy into your tools.”
One example of this is the Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System (CAPS), the peer-to-peer navigation technology from which CAPSTONE derives its name. By automating relative tracking between two or more spacecraft, CAPS reduces the need for ground-based tracking and enables autonomous navigation.
The company is also applying artificial intelligence (AI) tech to detect, track, and characterize space debris. Machine learning advances coming out of the larger tech industry are enabling Advanced Space’s engineers to create systems for gathering, processing, and cataloging information that will help spacecraft avoid collisions as Earth’s orbit becomes increasingly full of operating satellites and junk.
“We’re inviting people with their minds, their excitement, and their innovation,” says Dawn Massop Love, COO of Advanced Space. “You’re seeing it with AI and other technologies that are being developed because of the convergence between the aerospace and tech industries.”
The final piece we need to highlight is systems integration. Advanced Space calls themselves a “thin prime” because they are the prime contractor on missions like CAPSTONE and Oracle but they don’t build any of the hardware themselves. Instead, they identify a requirement (such as flying an NRHO around the Moon), work backward from there, and find the best vendors for equipment like the satellite’s structure, propulsion, and sensors.
Their job is integrating every component into a single system that their automation software stack can then govern. This approach lets them move quickly and address real mission needs for NASA and other organizations.
Advanced Space’s Colorado ecosystem
Colorado Tech Insider
“The growing number of small aerospace companies in Colorado is a testament not just to the number of smart people who want to be here doing great things, but also to the community,” says Cheetham. “When people have problems, the Colorado space community comes together. There’s a spirit in Colorado of Western resiliency, and that mentality helps small companies because we come together, do great work, and are willing to take on big challenges.”
Our state has the best space economy in the nation. With over 30,000 aerospace workers and over 300 companies, Colorado is the top state in the US for aerospace per capita. Large primes like Lockheed Martin and United Launch Alliance certainly play a big role, but so do smaller companies like Advanced Space.
When we combine this with Colorado’s booming tech economy, we get the convergence that Massop Love pointed to above. Technical expertise meets a robust business network. National security meets national labs.
Ultimately, it’s Colorado’s collaborative culture that sets it apart from other tech hubs. “I’ve worked with people on both coasts, and the culture of the Colorado community is unique,” Cheetham explains. “We give first. It’s less about ‘what’s in it for me’ and more about how we can come together to solve problems.”
Key relationships in Colorado
No matter the sector, the discussion of tech in Colorado always comes back to the top-tier universities.
“CU Boulder has the best aerospace program. It attracts people who want to live in Colorado and get the best education, so we want to be here so we can feed from that school,” says Dr. Parker, who holds an MS and a PhD from CU. Cheetham, Massop Love, and many others at Advanced Space are also CU alumni.
Dr. Parker continues to teach a class, while Advanced Space provides internships and mentoring for CU students. “Not only do we hire graduates from the program, but now they are serving as mentors,” explains Massop Love. “That lifecycle of learning from each other and working together multigenerationally makes a thriving community.”
Relationships with other local companies are also key. The Oracle spacecraft is being built in Centennial by General Atomics. The chip-scale atomic clock on CAPSTONE was provided by Orion Space Solutions in Louisville. The satellite itself was put into orbit by Rocket Lab, a company with a major presence in the state.
Cheetham also points to the Blackstone Entrepreneurs Network as an organization that provides community, advice, and mentorship for local business owners. He now serves on the board.
You’re invited to get involved
As we begin the most exciting era of space exploration, going to the Moon and beyond, the local Colorado community is pioneering the way. Just like the state played a major role in the development and deployment of GPS, the same is now happening with space exploration and industry.
If you’re excited to get involved, start by tapping into the community. Advanced Space invites you to join their monthly Space Industry Happy Hour. This informal networking event has been going strong for several years and serves as a place for people to come together, share their passion, and form valuable connections.
We hope to see you there!
About the Colorado Tech Spotlight
The Colorado Tech Spotlight highlights local innovations and the stories behind them. The series explores how the Colorado tech ecosystem creates an environment that promotes technological progress.
It is produced by Dynamic Tech Media and written by John Himes.
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