“It’s going to be the biggest market in the history of mankind.” Lunar Outpost co-founder and CEO Justin Cyrus is referring here to the space economy, and Lunar Outpost, a company that develops rovers and other technologies for land and space applications, is determined to have a stake in that future, even as an increasingly crowded field of startups and mainstream companies look for their piece of the pie as well.
That’s part of the reason why the Colorado-based Lunar Outpost decided to seek venture capital for the first time five years after its founding and move forward with the remarkable profitability of a space startup. The result was the company’s oversubscribed $12 million seed funding round, which closed in May. The funding round was led by Explorer 1 Fund with participation from Promus Ventures, Space Capital, Type 1 Ventures, and Cathexis Ventures.
Lunar Outpost is banking on early experience to give it a big boost against its competitors, and to that end, the company has already made some arrangements for space missions in 2023 and beyond. On its first mission, Lunar Outpost will partner with Nokia and Intuitive Machines in early 2023 to send a 10-kilogram rover – called the Mobile Autonomous Exploration Platform (MAPP) – to the moon’s south pole. The company is also sending a rover to explore the mysterious Reiner Gamma feature on the Moon on a fully funded mission for NASA, also a collaboration with Intuitive Machines. Most importantly, it is part of a team that includes Northrop Grumman, Michelin, AVL, and Intuitive Machines that is bidding on a contract to build a manned lunar terrain vehicle for NASA.
“We saw our competitors starting to try to catch up, and we felt that this funding could be used not only to further differentiate ourselves and dig a little bit of a moat if you will but also to accelerate our commercialization timeline in lunar space,” Cyrus told TechCrunch in a recent interview.
An alternative path to the moon
In some ways, Lunar Outpost has set itself apart by taking a different path to market than many other space startups. It has done so by commercializing an air quality sensor – which was designed as part of a contract bid between NASA and Lockheed Martin to build a prototype lunar orbiting habitat. When Lockheed didn’t win the next phase of that contract, Lunar Outpost turned to the product and used it to help the city of Denver win a $1 million contract to monitor air quality in Colorado schools. This air quality sensor – Canary – is now in use in more than 35 states.
As a result, Lunar Outpost is already bringing in revenue well ahead of many other space startups. “Last quarter, we actually outpaced several publicly traded space companies in terms of revenue, and that’s largely by design,” Cyrus said.
Lunar Outpost is also working to create a terrestrial version of its MAPP rover family and has begun prototyping a 300-kilogram version for use on Earth and in space. in the future, Cyrus noted, the company could even design rovers in excess of 1,000 kilograms, which would allow it to move materials and extract resources on the moon. In addition, he added that the growth of the ground-based product line is another driver for seeking outside investment.
“We really need to build our team, build our facilities to keep up with the demand for these terrestrial products,” he said.
Justin Cyrus, a graduate of the University of Colorado at Boulder and the Colorado School of Mines, is known to have worked on military satellites at Lockheed Martin before founding Lunar Outpost with his brother Julian Cyrus and Forrest Meyen in 2017. The company’s initial steps on the moon will be to use rovers, but Cyrus said the long-term vision is to help generate a legal and economic framework for space resources.
Lunar Outpost has set its sights on in situ resource utilization (ISRU) – a fancy way of saying “using the resources in space while in space. The company demonstrated ISRU on the Mars Trailblazer rover in collaboration with MIT and NASA, using a technology called MOXIE (Mars Oxygen In Situ Resource Utilization Experiment). It produced 5.4 grams of oxygen in one hour.
Cyrus noted that Lunar Outpost received a separate award from NASA in 2020 for collecting lunar samples and selling them to the agency. lunar Outpost was one of four companies awarded under this NASA initiative that offered to sell any lunar material it collected for $1. It’s a largely symbolic amount, Cyrus said, and it helps set norms and standards around the collection and sale of space resources.
These awards are structured so that NASA pays the company 10 percent of the total amount at the start of the award, so which means Lunar Outpost’s check is worth only 10 cents. But Lunar Outpost sees this as just the beginning.
