OrbitBeyond

Orbit Beyond, Inc., usually stylized as ORBITBeyond, is an aerospace company that builds technologies for lunar exploration. Its products include configurable delivery lunar landers with a payload capacity of up to , and rovers.

Orbit Beyond, Inc., usually stylized as ORBITBeyond, is an aerospace company that builds technologies for lunar exploration. Its products include configurable delivery lunar landers with a payload capacity of up to , and rovers. ==Overview== On November 29, 2018, ORBITBeyond was selected to bid robotic lander contracts from NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS). ORBITBeyond has engaged former Google Lunar XPRIZE competitor TeamIndus (Axiom Research Labs) for lander engineering, Honeybee Robotics for payload integration, Advanced Space for mission management, and Ceres Robotics for surface operations. Their aim is to create collaborative and scalable spacecraft exploration platforms to support commercial market growth in the cislunar space. On May 31, 2019, NASA announced that it had selected OrbitBeyond as one of three commercial partners to deliver NASA payloads to the Moon with its Z-01 lander in 2020 and 2021. OrbitBeyond was awarded $97 million to land NASA payloads in Mare Imbrium by September 2020. However, the company dropped out of this contract in July 2019, citing its inability to complete the missions on schedule. Orbit Beyond remains a CLPS contractor eligible to bid on future contracts. ==Spacecraft== The company is developing two lunar landers, Z-01 and Z-02, and a small rover called ECA. ===ECA rover=== Z-01 lander would deploy a micro-rover called ECA (Ek Choti si Asha, Hindi for "A Small Hope"), also developed by Team Indus (now called Axiom Research Labs). ECA is a technology demonstrator tasked with visually exploring the vicinity of the landing site to a range of at least 500 m. The vehicle is a solar powered electric 4-wheeled rover, its mass is less than , and its maximum drive speed is about 6 cm/s. ECA is equipped with a pair of articulated stereo cameras and a Sun sensor. Monitoring and commanding of the rover is done exclusively through a lander relay link. The rover will operate for one lunar day, and is expected to succumb to the long frigid lunar night. ==See also== Google Lunar XPRIZE Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) Newspace ==References==

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