Progress toward making future space communities possible

Space settlement requires developing several seemingly disconnected technologies that will eventually be synergistic. This year, these efforts and technologies took a step forward. The first two missions under NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services program began. In February, an Intuitive Machines Nova-C lander touched down near the moon's south pole, though it tipped over shortly after. The lander carried a few settlement-related experiments, including cloth from Columbia Sportswear of Oregon that could be used for heat-rejection covers, the Stereo Cameras for Lunar Plume-Surface Studies experiment, with which researchers aim to determine the effects that the plume created by a descending lander would have on nearby settlements.