A NASA-industry team is embarking on a follow-up to a cubesat mission to the moon by developing a pair of smallsats that will test rendezvous and proximity operations there.
NASA announced July 24 it is working with Advanced Space on the CAPSTONE 02 mission, scheduled to launch in late 2027. It will feature two spacecraft built by Terran Orbital that will operate in a highly elliptical lunar orbit. The mission completed its critical design review earlier this month.
The project is a successor to the original CAPSTONE, or Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment, which launched in 2022. It was a single cubesat testing operations in near-rectilinear halo orbit (NRHO) around the moon, intended to inform plans for NASA’s lunar Gateway. That mission also was led by Advanced Space using a Terran Orbital bus.
CAPSTONE 02 builds upon that earlier mission, which Brad Cheetham, chief executive of Colorado-based Advanced Space, now calls CAPSTONE Classic. “We realized that there are other technical challenges and technology demonstrations that we needed to do that we just couldn’t get to with CAPSTONE Classic,” he said in an interview.
Key among them is demonstrating rendezvous and proximity operations (RPO) in the vicinity of the moon, particularly in orbits where the gravity of both the Earth and moon influence trajectories. Another is testing autonomous flight operations around the moon and beyond.
