Very soon, a NASA SmallSat named Lunar Flashlight will be launched on SpaceX Falcon 9. Its destination, as the name infers, is our moon. Lunar Flashlight will be the first interplanetary spacecraft to use a new kind of “green” propellant called ASCENT. This propellant, developed by the Air Force Research Laboratory and tested on a previous NASA technology demonstration mission, ‘burns’ via a catalyst, rather than requiring a separate oxidizer. That is why it’s called a monopropellant. It is called ‘green prop’ because it is safer to transport and store than the commonly used in-space propellants such as hydrazine.

Lunar Flashlight’s propulsion system, referred to as LFPS, was developed by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, with assembly, integration, and testing (AI&T) support from Georgia Tech Research Institute in Atlanta. It’s four small thrusters were developed and built by a small business in Huntsville, Alabama called Plasma Processes LLC. Better known for high temperature coatings and additive fabrication processes, Plasma Processes had a small team of engineers working on a NASA Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) contract to develop a 0.1 Newton (N) ASCENT propellant thruster. It was this team that was contracted in late 2019 to build the thrusters for Lunar Flashlight.

Over the course of 15 months and in the grips of a global pandemic, Plasma Processes designed, built, qualified, delivered, and integrated four 0.1N thrusters onto the LFPS. This SBIR presented challenges in thruster design, thermal management, and a form factor rarely seen with a chemical thruster. The great challenge with ASCENT propellant is the heat. ASCENT owes its high performance to its high combustion temperature. The challenge was amplified by the small size of the thruster. “We were limited in the number of solutions we could reasonably try and reliably integrate” an engineer said. “At one end of the thruster, the chamber temperature is above 1100°C and less than an inch away, we need to be close to room temperature.” Despite these challenges, the small propulsion team demonstrated their resourcefulness and collaborative mindset on many occasions to elegantly solve such problems. “There were many long days and late night hot fire tests” remarked another team member. “We applied what we learned and retested over an over until we got it right. Now, we have a very good understanding on how to approach those problems for future thrusters.” The 0.1N thruster was originally qualified for 0.5 kg of propellant throughput. Since then, Plasma Processes extended the qualification campaign several times, and the thruster is now qualified for more than 3 kg and shows no signs of degraded performance.

The successful development of the 0.1N thruster was a catalyst for new developments and growth. “Plasma has been manufacturing components for rocket engines for decades,” said Plasma Processes President, Tim McKechnie. “Lunar Flashlight will be the first spacecraft to be propelled by engines we designed, manufactured, qualified, and hot fire tested.” Daniel Cavender, the NASA project manager of the LFPS project and NASA’s green prop working group (GPWG) chair, joined Plasma Processes as the Director of Propulsion in July 2022. The propulsion division was rebranded as Rubicon Space Systems and given the mandate to commercialize its line of thrusters and develop a line of propulsion systems for the small satellite industry. Rubicon Space Systems has won programs for 1N and 5N thruster developments and has been developing two smallsat propulsion systems leveraging its experience with the Lunar Flashlight propulsion system.

The Lunar Flashlight spacecraft was fueled at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in October and was delivered to the space coast last week. It is scheduled to launch aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on November 30th with the Japanese Hakuto-R lander and United Arab Emirate’s Rashid 1 rover. Once launched, Lunar Flashlight will take roughly three months to reach the Moon, where it will achieve a polar orbit and begin its two-month primary mission.

With the upcoming launch, Rubicon Space Systems and Plasma Processes LLC could not be prouder of our contribution to the mission. “We all feel that we had the opportunity to do something very special,” Cavender said. “Lunar Flashlight will be only the second spacecraft to fly the ASCENT propellant and the first use beyond LEO and the first around the Moon. It’s exciting, and we look forward to the launch in about a week.” McKechnie added “I would like to congratulate our team and NASA on this historic success. We look forward to seeing more of our green propulsion technologies on future missions.”

Live launch coverage will be available at the link provided. https://www.youtube.com/c/SpaceX/streams

About Lunar Flashlight:

The Lunar Flashlight mission is a small satellite that will shine near-infrared lasers into permanently shadowed regions at the lunar south pole and measure the surface reflectance. The observations will provide information about surface water ice deposits inside craters that could be valuable in situ resources for future Artemis missions to the lunar surface. Lunar Flashlight will demonstrate several technological firsts, including being the first mission to look for water ice using active laser spectroscopy and the first planetary CubeSat mission to use "green" propulsion. A new flight computer and miniaturized software defined radio will also be demonstrated. Lunar Flashlight is developed and managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and operated by Georgia Tech. The LF propulsion system was developed by the Georgia Tech Research Institute and NASA MSFC. The mission measurement team members are from Goddard Space Flight Center, University of California Los Angeles, the Applied Physics Laboratory, and the University of Colorado Boulder.