Pittsburgh becoming a ‘space city’ as Astrobotic, ProtoInnovations prepare to send technology to the moon

Pittsburgh was once known as the steel city, but two local companies believe they’re transforming it into a space city.

“We’re a space base now,” said Alivia Chapla, director of communications at North Shore-based Astrobotic.

Astrobotic and Lawrenceville-based Proto­Innovations have received millions of dollars in NASA funding and are playing integral roles in upcoming lunar missions.

Astrobotic is set to launch its first lunar landing project — a lander dubbed Peregrine — later this year. It’s poised to be the first commercial mission to the moon and America’s first soft landing on the lunar surface since the Apollo program, Chapla said.

It’s equipped with a solar panel on top to keep its batteries charged during its voyage to the moon, and its journey will be monitored and controlled from a command center in Astrobotic’s North Shore facility.

“Peregrine is pretty historic, because it’s carrying more scientific instruments than any other vehicle we know of,” Chapla said.

It’s carrying an array of equipment for various entities, including a rover being sent into space by Carnegie Mellon University and a fleet of “micro-rovers” that will become the first scientific equipment sent to the moon from Mexico, she said.

“We imagine being the go-to company for the moon. We are the moon company,” Chapla said.

Astrobotic is building another lunar lander, called Griffin, which is set to deliver to the moon a 1,000-pound NASA rover that will search for
water on the lunar surface. Griffin is the largest lunar lander since the Apollo missions, Chapla said.

The NASA rover, called VIPER, will be outfitted with software from ProtoInnovations.

It’s set to make its lunar journey next year to search for water or ice at the moon’s south pole.

Software designed by ProtoInnovations will help the NASA rover to better maneuver around the moon’s terrain autonomously, meaning people on Earth won’t have to manually control its movements and actions, said Samuel Chandler, the company’s chief technology officer.

Their software provides the rover with “better situational awareness” of its environment and teaches it “ways of extracting itself from the terrain” if it gets stuck, Chandler said.

The technology being designed at ProtoInnovations essentially allows the rover to “think” on its own, Chandler said, which is important given the communications delays and other logistical challenges associated with having a human control the rover from Earth.

ProtoInnovations’ technology also will allow the rover to use tools autonomously so it can perform tasks like excavating, drilling and building, said ProtoInnovations founder, owner and CEO Dimi Apostolopoulos.

ProtoInnovations and Astrobotic received grants last month from NASA’s Tipping Point Program, which allows companies throughout the country to partner with NASA to advance technology that benefits NASA’s space exploration needs. The program distributed $150 million in such awards to companies last month — including $35 million to Astrobotic and $6.2 million to ProtoInnovations.

ProtoInnovations earned the grant money for an initiative that will take their software used in autonomous rovers like VIPER and package it so that it could be applied to any rover, Chandler said.

Currently, most rovers are programmed with one-off software that isn’t reused, he explained. Their goal is to create a standard software that would be used to program future rovers used by NASA or independent companies, which would cut the cost of software for each mission.

Apostolopoulos said the ProtoInnovations team can test their software — as well as the mechanical components and rovers the company also develops — in a test pit within their Lawrenceville facility. It’s designed to simulate a lunar environment and mimic conditions rovers may experience on the moon, including the sandy soil, varying temperatures and obstacles like rocks.

“Any mission that uses a rover could benefit from what we’re doing,” Apostolopoulos said.

Astrobotic received NASA Tipping Point funding to support its CubeRovers, which will be able to drive off a lunar lander and across the moon’s surface, Chapla said.

Astrobotic is working to develop charging technologies that would allow lunar landers, CubeRovers and other equipment to wirelessly recharge in the moon’s harsh conditions. Charging on the moon, Chapla said, is harder than on Earth because of challenges ranging from significant temperature drops to the prevalence of a type of “very jagged” sand that “sticks to absolutely everything,” including charging components.

The goal is to test that technology on the moon in 2026, Chapla said.

With such advances happening in Pittsburgh, she said, the city is becoming a hub for space technology.

“We were a steel city, and now we’re trending towards a tech city,” Chapla said. “That set the stage for us also to be a space city.”

It’s not just companies like Astrobotic and ProtoInnovations that benefit from the new focus on the space industry in the city, Chapla said. Astrobotic works with 165 suppliers in Pennsylvania and relies on builders, engineers and a variety of other workers to provide the parts and expertise to make advanced lunar missions possible.

“We really merge the blue-collar and white-collar here,” she said. “All of us are raising the whole boat for the economy in Pittsburgh using the space industry.”

Technologies like GPS and weather tracking were improved because of work done on the moon, Chapla said, and upcoming lunar missions provide the opportunity for new scientific and technological advancements. The moon could prove to be a launch pad for future exploration of more distant planets, she said.

“There’s so much that we haven’t learned about the origins of our planet and our solar system that we could learn from the moon,” she said.

Things that once sounded like science fiction — power grids on the lunar surface and a long-term human presence on the moon — are “within reach” of modern technology, Chapla said.

Pittsburgh is perfectly poised to be at the forefront of space technology and innovation, Apostolopoulos said. The city’s universities — particularly Carnegie Mellon, which boasts a top robotics program — can play a role in these technological advancements, he said, pointing out that Pittsburgh was similarly at the forefront of autonomous vehicle technology (Apostolopoulos also is a professor at Carnegie Mellon University).

“Pittsburgh became the city of change and innovation in space technologies,” he said. “This place has become a fertile ground to do robotics. We have this amazing potential in this city to be the fuel for this industry.”

With that growth, he said, will come more jobs. It also will provide additional opportunities for local companies to benefit by building parts necessary for space robotics, he said, explaining ProtoInnovations already partners with local companies for components like brakes and motors used in its rovers.

“This is like a dream, being able to create and give back to the community and create jobs,” Apostolopoulos said.

With NASA infusing funds into commercial space programs and a renewed interest in space exploration, Apostolopoulos said there’s plenty of room for the industry to grow and flourish in Pittsburgh.

“This is just the beginning,” he said. “Our students will be the ones to build on what we’re doing right now. That’s how these ecosystems grow.”