Building Space Infrastructure
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403 kg. The largest American rover ever sent to the Moon, and heavier than every lunar rover launched since 1973 combined.
Apollo’s LRV was built by a few thousand people at Boeing/GM over ~17 months, with a sizable NASA budget behind it.
FLIP went from blank sheet to flight-qualified in a 18 months, with a team of <100, on private capital.
FLIP carries 20 NASA and commercial payloads, runs on much the same core mobility, power, and comms stack as the CLV-1 we’re building for Artemis as part of our broader architecture, and is part of the first Moon Base mission.
Excited to see it fly on @voyagertech_ Griffin lander, launching atop @SpaceX Falcon Heavy late this year!
Manny Shar retweeted
FLIP, meet your ride to the Moon.
While FLIP was at @NASAJPL for testing, so was @voyagertech_'s Griffin-1 Lander. As Griffin passed by FLIP's test chamber, we took advantage of this first meeting for a bonus test. Teams completed a Wi-Fi test, successfully sending 11 commands and a picture through the full data chain.
Next time these two meet, it will be for integration for launch. See you later this year, Griffin.
Manny Shar retweeted
NASA leadership stopped by Astrolab to check out FLIP before it heads to Cape Canaveral for launch later this year.
NASA Program Manager for the Moon Base Carlos García-Galán and Chief Architect for the Moon Base Nujoud Merancy toured our clean room with Astrolab CEO Jaret Matthews and gave our rover a send-off.
Manny Shar retweeted
Our FLIP rover is equipped with a 6.22 kWh battery and a deployable solar panel with a peak power of nearly 270 W. The solar panel will deploy after landing on the lunar surface and be stowed as FLIP attempts to survive a weeks long lunar night.
The solar panel has gone through many deployments here on Earth to ensure its ready for the harsh conditions of the Moon.
Manny Shar retweeted
A fully and rapidly reusable rocket will fundamentally change how humanity accesses outer space. “The Holy Grail of Rocketry” continues the ongoing Starship series with a look back at the scrappy days of SpaceX engineers proving reuse was possible and takes you onboard a high-seas race to recover a floating Starship
Manny Shar retweeted
Every Moon base—whatever its design—will need power and connectivity. Rovers are key to setting up these systems. They will roll out cable. They will connect our lunar habitats.
We’ve been field-testing infrastructure deployment with our FLEX rover since 2021.
Mobility is just the start: our rovers will establish the future of lunar operations.
Let the competition continue for the first South Pole landing…
The shot clock is still running.
China remains a serious competitor in space, and we should expect them to keep moving with pace.
@NASA remains laser-focused on our mission: Return Americans to the Moon and ensure the United States gets there first.
arstechnica.com/space/2026/0…
In ~2 years Astrolab will have gone from blank sheet to flying FLIP, the largest American rover, the first designed to survive the lunar night, and the fastest supercomputer and GPU on another world.
Faster and cheaper don’t have to be a compromise.
NASA has been building robotic lunar rover prototypes for decades. Why is the Moon not crawling with them? Because NASA insists on running a Survivor beauty pageant for everything and the lunar rovers were always the bridesmaid never the bride.
We haven't had a shortage of launchers for a decade, but all this capability remains stuck in development hell, and meanwhile China understands that you can just Do Things and there they are.
Manny Shar retweeted
With FLIP rover vibration testing completed successfully last month, let's dive into the results.
The sounds you are hearing in the background of this video were designed from live sounds captured during the week and a half of vibe testing. During these tests the rover was subjected to the highest structural loads and most stressful vibration environment it will ever experience. Launch will be less stressful than what it has already survived. Health checks during and after testing show that FLIP came out the other side in pristine condition.
Before tests like this, the engineering team makes approximations about what the hardware can handle. Now that they have accelerometer data, the team is correlating the structural model with the data from the test. This will allow the engineers to conduct the final round of structural analysis to certify the rover for launch.
One more step towards the launch pad and lunar surface.
Certainly an elegant approach but you can’t get to *rapid* reuse this way.
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