How to follow CLPS Moon mission updates

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched Moon landers from Firefly and ispace respectively on January 15. Images: SpaceX / NASA / Frank Michaux

With a fleet of NASA-supported robotic Moon landers part of the agency’s CLPS program launching throughout this decade, I’ve compiled an exhaustive rundown for you to be up to speed on these novel missions:

I update this page every month or two. Other than referencing everything high-level I can on there, whose more than one hundred links should help you get to places, there’s more you can do to keenly follow all things CLPS:

  1. Check the new NASA CLPS sub-site. The agency updated a few pages lately, including adding Principal Investigators for VIPER payloads. At the same time, some already known high-level information from elsewhere on nasa.gov is missing there! Some of that can be found on nasa.gov’s CLPS page, which is different from the sub-site mentioned above, but hosts other information bits that are outdated.
  2. Subscribe to blogs of all CLPS vendors in an RSS reader and also manually check their sites. This is especially useful to find and know about the non-NASA-funded payloads aboard CLPS landers. If NASA wants to highlight progress on the “commercial” part of CLPS, listing non-NASA payloads on the official CLPS pages would be great.
  3. NASA hasn’t posted on the official CLPS blog for more than a year but has been putting out a few CLPS updates on the Artemis blog. And yet the CLPS blog is the one currently linked on official CLPS pages. It’s quite confusing.
  4. Since information about CLPS wouldn’t necessarily be restricted to these direct sources, use a feature similar to Keyword Monitoring within your RSS reader to create a feed of posts that match CLPS-specific search terms across all your added sources.
  5. Browse my dedicated CLPS coverage page and search the Moon Monday archive.

Subscribe for free to Moon Monday to receive mission updates with context 🙃. No, seriously, it’s one of the reasons I write this one-of-a-kind blog+newsletter!


Share via Email →