Venturi Astrolab, Inc. announced that NASA has awarded the company, together with its teammates Axiom Space, Inc. and Odyssey Space Research, a contract to advance the development of Artemis campaign's Lunar Terrain Vehicle (LTV), which will help Artemis astronauts explore more of the Moon's surface on future missions.
The Astrolab team is one of three teams to win contract awards. Astrolab's contract is worth up to $1.9 billion.
With this announcement, and after two decades dedicated to high-performance terrestrial electric vehicles, Venturi is taking another major step forward. The industrial group, led by its President Gildo Pastor, designs and manufactures the lunar vehicle's wheels and batteries. The hyper-deformable wheels are developed and manufactured by the Venturi's Swiss entity in collaboration with Astrolab. As for the batteries, these will be manufactured in Monaco in specifically designed facilities at the heart of the Venturi's historic headquarters.
Astrolab first revealed the full-scale working prototype for its Flexible Logistics and Exploration (FLEX) rover in March of 2022. In the years since, Astrolab has conducted thousands of hours of laboratory and field testing that has led to numerous design improvements. The improvements to the wheels and batteries came as a result of tests Astrolab conducted together with Venturi's engineers.
As required by NASA, FLEX can carry two suited astronauts, accommodate a robotic arm to support science exploration, perform robotic cargo logistics and survive the extreme temperatures at the lunar South Pole, which is a technological challenge, particularly for the hyper-deformable wheels and batteries. FLEX can be operated remotely from Earth even when astronauts are not present, or it can be operated by suited astronauts.
Once FLEX arrives on the lunar surface, Astrolab expects that FLEX will become the largest and most capable rover to ever travel to the Moon. With a maximum combined rover and cargo mass of more than two tons, the FLEX rover is nearly three times the mass of its largest predecessor. This increased capacity provides significantly more opportunities to conduct scientific experiments and commercial endeavors on the lunar surface.
For more information contact:
Venturi Astrolab, Inc.
info@venturi.com