Friends,
I figured an update was in order, given Astrobotic was tweeting this out.
First, you probably recall that I’ve purchased another payload through Astrobotic, to try again to send our Writers on the Moon payload to the moon through the Moonbox program — the hitch being that Astrobotic makes no guarantee they actually have a mission going, or if they do, that Moonbox will be part of it (again). But I bought a payload anyway: in part to let Astrobotic know we still believed in them!
Well, NASA hasn’t quite had the same confidence (which is a big bummer) because they pulled their Viper payload off the Griffin mission (that was scheduled to go to the moon this year, but it’s looking more like early 2025 now).
Given that, Astrobotic is now trying to figure out what to fly on Griffin instead, thus the solicitation for commercial payloads — but by “commercial” they mean $10M+ research payload, not our little Moonbox.
HOWEVER… I believe (and this is me guessing now) that if they DO come up with a substitute payload and thus STILL DO THE GRIFFIN MISSION, there will likely be room for our little payload on there. But a lot of IFs in that…
Still possible. But don’t get too excited about this tweet.
All the best,
Sue