Start your EV engines: DARPA head waves flag for Grand Oz Challenge
- 30 October 2024
US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) program manager Michael “Orbit” Nayak says Australia could use a DARPA-like Grand Challenge for in situ resource utilisation, or ISRU, technology testing to advance its case for a prominent place in a burgeoning future Moon economy.
The planetary scientist, airforce pilot and former space shuttle engineer, who is spearheading DARPA’s 10-Year Lunar Architecture Capability (LunA-10) project, says a “LunA-10 in the Australian outback” could bring technology companies together in a collaborative but competitive space to test interoperability between lunar power, communications “and of course mining” equipment.
“When I think about the roles that Australia could play in the LunA-10 vision there’s a lot of synergy between this community and a future lunar economy,” Nayak said at the AROSE Mining and Space forum at IMARC 2024 in Sydney, Australia.
“Mining is at the heart of it – it’s the anchor tenant.
“How do we mine in the Starship era? What can Australia offer the world in terms of a unique playground to rapidly test new commercial mining technology?
“I would like to see more analogue facilities where we can test quickly modified mining technologies [for this new era].
“An example is leveraging existing facilities like the Australian Automation Robotics Precinct, where mining companies test already.
“That expertise, and unique insight, is key to thinking about the Moon differently.
“More as an industrial activity than as an exquisite science project.”
The US government agency kicked off its unique DARPA Grand Challenge 20 years ago to try to accelerate domestic development of autonomous vehicle technologies.
Nayak said “something like a Grand Challenge for ISRU testing would galvanise the synergy between the mining industry and lunar exploration”.
He said ISRU was central to unlocking a sustainable presence on the Moon.
“The utility case at the centre of the economy is what we’re calling the anchor tenant, around which all other services are based.
“What is the anchor tenant for the Moon?
“The answer is, you are.
“Resources abundant on the Moon include oxygen for propellant, water and a variety of useful metals such as silicon for microelectronics and aluminium. A complete ISRU-based lunar economy will need to develop industries that can utilise all available resources.
“More than that, as the anchor tenant, you anchor all the other services that were part of LunA-10.
“Mining is power-hungry. You need megawatt hours of power and today we’re at the watt-hour level [so] lots of room for commercial growth.
“Terabytes of data.
“Robotics as a service for remote maintenance of equipment in harsh operating conditions.
“Transportation of heavy equipment to the lunar surface and return of mined resources to Earth.
“All these commercial industries have a successful business model if you are successful.
“When Starship can land 100 tonnes on the Moon, we can build bigger and cheaper and more.
“So I ask you, what intelligent design decisions would you make to leverage known and well understood mining equipment for the Moon? A world in which we design lunar construction rovers the way we design cars is the world I want to encourage you to think about.
“Let’s make the minimum number of changes to operate in the harsh lunar environment, and then act together to accelerate the tech development of those components.”
Nayak said Australia’s mining industry had developed unique expertise in building and operating hardware that could survive in harsh operating conditions. A local terrestrial-lunar advanced vehicle technology challenge could accelerate development both ways, and “show that [the best tech] can be robust to unexpected factors, because there will be plenty of those on the Moon”.
He also encouraged the IMARC audience to consider a tech moonshot.
“What is the high-risk, high-payoff thing that may be worth investigation?
“My answer is the intersection between mining and biotechnology.
“As you well know from terrestrial mining, not every resource may be commercially viable to extract.
“But if we go to the trouble of digging deep into icy craters on the Moon, what can we do with all the extracted, moved regolith in a secondary process that can have slower but still valuable gains?
“Can we use biology, engineered anaerobic microbe farms and foodstock to process through that waste material and increase profitability of the enterprise?
“I think that’s an interesting bet with lots of technology white space yet to be explored.”
