“We’re taking the Nvidia Jetson and comparing it to our flight compute platform that has a little bit more spaceflight heritage,” Lunar Outpost CEO Justin Cyrus said. “ seeing what the pros are, seeing what the cons are. And we’re really pushing towards trying to adopt these more capable GPU-powered systems in these extreme environments.”
Jetson is NVIDIA's compact, power-efficient computing platform designed for robotics and edge AI applications. Unlike the company's larger data center GPUs, the platform processes sensor data locally, allowing autonomous systems to analyze their surroundings and respond without relying on remote computing.
Lunar Outpost said its next rover will carry scientific instruments into craters and other locations that are difficult to study from orbit. A subsequent mission is planned to explore Reiner Gamma, a region of the lunar surface known for its magnetic anomaly.
NVIDIA has also expanded Jetson's role in lunar exploration through a partnership with Firefly Aerospace. The companies plan to operate the platform aboard a satellite orbiting the moon to process imagery for lunar mapping and track robotic missions on the surface.
According to Cyrus, Lunar Outpost's autonomy software has evolved from relying primarily on deterministic systems to combining those systems with physical AI. “Our autonomy stack was a bit more deterministic five years ago, and now it’s a combination of deterministic and physical AI, which is pretty fun,” Cyrus said. “We still run both in parallel, and then it’s our job to figure out where physical AI can actually plug into our stack and help us do things that no one’s done before.”
Running GPUs on the moon presents challenges that differ from operations in low Earth orbit, including greater exposure to radiation, extreme temperature swings and strict power limitations.
“Your system has to survive lunar night and has to do so on very low power,” Cyrus said.
The company believes more capable onboard computing could allow future robotic systems to process their surroundings faster and make decisions with greater autonomy, capabilities it sees as important for supporting long-term human operations on the moon.
“What we at Lunar Outpost are currently working on is how do we go from exploration to permanence, how do we actually build that outpost on the moon?” Cyrus said. “We do think combining our deterministic models plus the physical AI layer — that’s what allows us to make a human presence in space sustainable, actually having that robotic workforce.”
Lunar Outpost's longer-term roadmap includes several additional autonomous lunar rovers and Pegasus, a larger rover designed to transport astronauts. Pegasus is planned to launch aboard a Blue Origin rocket, although that vehicle experienced an anomaly earlier this year and its return-to-flight schedule remains uncertain.
“It does seem like they’re making pretty darn good progress on the pad,” Cyrus said. “I can’t really answer Blue Origin’s timelines or NASA’s timelines on the pad reconstruction, but everything we’ve been told, we’re on the same timeline .”
This analysis is based on reporting from TechCrunch.
Image courtesy of Lunar Outpost.
This article was generated with AI assistance and reviewed for accuracy and quality.
