Advanced Space

Every time the Advanced Space team delivers a navigation solution or executes a maneuver on CAPSTONE in its NRHO at the Moon, we are building on work Dave Folta spent a career developing at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. Earlier this month, many of us gathered at NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration Headquarters for a symposium honoring Dave's contributions to astrodynamics: decades of libration point mission design, halo orbit stationkeeping, and the operational techniques that made the NRHO a viable destination rather than a thought experiment. Celebrated as an intermission - not a conclusion. I was assigned to work for Dave as a young engineer. That assignment is the reason I spent several years of graduate studies on Earth-Moon three-body navigation. It is the reason Advanced Space exists. It is the reason our team is operating CAPSTONE today, delivering mission design and navigation services for ESCAPADE, leading Oracle, and pushing commercial deep space mission services forward. Mentorship like Dave's compounds. The people he trained went on to train others. The missions he enabled made other missions possible. You can draw a straight line from his work at Goddard to what a lot of us are doing commercially at the Moon right now. Dave: thank you! The field is better for the decades you put in, and a lot of careers, mine included, wouldn't look the same without you. Thanks also to Jim Way and American Astronautical Society for helping make this happen. Speakers and organizers did a great job! Cassie Webster Yasmine Almond Jeffrey Parker Diane Craig Davis Michael Amato Thomas Gardner Daniel Scheeres J. Russell Carpenter Becky Mesarch Lauri Newman

Welcome home Reid, Victor, Christina, and Jeremy! 🫶 The NASA Artemis II astronauts have splashed down at 8:07 p.m. EDT (0007 UTC), bringing their historic 10-day mission around the Moon to an end.

Are you watching this?! NASA's Artemis 2 crew just flew around the Moon. 4 humans are on their way back FROM THE MOON! This is a turning point, we have returned to the Moon, and this time we're going to stay. Building a permanent Moon Base requires capabilities at a scale never before achieved in deep space. We will need operations at a scale never before attempted. We will need navigation of orbital systems, landers, and rovers. We will need communications infrastructure to move more data than we have ever moved from deep space before. We will need mission design in innovative orbits. And we will need safety of flight, coordinating every cooperative and uncooperative object around the Moon. The team at Advanced Space has been working in all of these areas for over a decade, and we are ready to deploy innovative solutions rapidly to support this new National priority. The part that caught me off guard today: CAPSTONE (the mission Advanced Space owns and operates in lunar orbit) showed up in NASA's visualization right there between Orion and the Moon. We launched CAPSTONE nearly four years ago as a pathfinder for Artemis. Seeing it in that shot brought all of this work together in one moment. And I was even more surprised to spot one of the two ESCAPADE spacecraft in the same frame — currently en route to Mars. Advanced Space worked with University of California, Berkeley on designing ESCAPADE's trajectories and supporting operations for both spacecraft. None of this happens alone. I am incredibly grateful for our mission partners who continue to work on CAPSTONE at Terran Orbital Corporation, Morehead State University, NASA Ames Research Center, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Johnson Space Center, and NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Together we're building and demonstrating state-of-the-art tools that will enable safe operations at scale through autonomy and intelligent systems. CAPSTONE -> Artemis I -> Artemis II ->...-> Moon Base. We are just getting started. The future is NOW and we're proud to be building it.