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BROOMFIELD, COLORADO, September 23, 2024 - Outward Technologies was awarded $510,000 from NASA to continue development of its Sintering End Effector for Regolith (SEER) lunar surface construction technology through reduced gravity testing of a regolith feed and deposition subsystem. This regolith feed subsystem enables the production of multi-layer 3D printed landing pads, roadways, and habitats with regolith being the exclusive feedstock without the need for binders or additives. Additional applications for this regolith feed technology include the sampling and characterization of lunar regolith, and feed of regolith into oxygen and regolith resource extraction reactors on the Moon. Additionally, these efforts advance the current understanding of flowability of granular materials in reduced gravity through parabolic flight testing in simulated lunar, Martian, and zero gravity conditions all performed in a vacuum test environment.

BROOMFIELD, COLORADO, August 1, 2024 - Outward in partnership with the Colorado School of Mines was awarded $156,492 from NASA to develop a launch and landing pad design tool for identifying optimal geometries, materials, and configurations of landing pads, landing pad aprons, and berms constructed from bulk regolith on the Moon. Preliminary design criteria were established which captured traditional civil engineering design concepts applied to the lunar environment. This approach yielded a promising berm design which may be used to mitigate high-speed ejecta while eliminating complex collisions and deflected ejecta particles. While these concepts have been developed from a strong theoretical basis, additional numerical and experimental results were required to further validate the use of these bulk regolith structures in minimizing the risk posed to critical infrastructure and equipment by high-speed ejecta during lunar launches and landings.

BROOMFIELD, COLORADO, August 1, 2024 - Outward was awarded $156,432 to develop a regolith resource extractor for converting slag waste products from lunar oxygen plants into high strength glass and glass-ceramic materials for constructing towers and truss-based structures on the lunar surface. With the ability to adapt to a large variety of byproduct compositions, the system will be an extremely versatile piece of equipment to produce many of the components identified by NASA as critical to a sustained presence on the Moon. Glass and glass-ceramics produced from processed regolith waste products represent significant cost savings for producing mechanical hardware and structural members on the Moon by reducing total mass of material launched from Earth. The technology is designed to be incorporated into many existing oxygen extraction technologies and represents the state of the art in terms of fully melting, refining, and controlling crystal growth of manufactured regolith components at scale.

BROOMFIELD, COLORADO, July 12, 2024 - Outward was awarded $899,965 from NASA to continue development of Plume-Surface Interaction (PSI) software relevant to lunar and Martian landing conditions. These software tools include a two-way coupled Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and Discrete Element Method (DEM) numerical modeling framework for simulating regolith-plume interactions which is calibrated and validated to fit the soil mechanics response of ground obtained from PSI experimental data including time-dependent crater geometry and ejecta trajectories and velocities. These tools may ultimately be used to simulate PSI during a landing event at large-scale, deployed in a massively parallel cloud computing environment to enable high-fidelity PSI models for NASA and its commercial partners in the design and evaluation of landers in support of the Moon-to-Mars program and missions to other planetary bodies.

BROOMFIELD, COLORADO, June 5, 2024 - Outward was awarded $899,952 from NASA to continue development of a resource extraction technology to produce high purity minerals and metals in addition to oxygen from lunar regolith. The underlying method utilizes novel process and temperature control systems to extend terrestrial vacuum metallurgical extraction processes used since the 1940’s to lunar regolith feedstocks not typically associated with vacuum metallurgy. The technology requires little to no process consumables while yielding multiple high purity products. The process takes advantage of the lunar environment and utilizes demonstrated terrestrial industrial processes to reduce technical risk. Advancements of these methods can increase humanity’s presence in space by leveraging the readily available ultra-high vacuum on the Moon to unlock the abundant resources found within lunar regolith.

BROOMFIELD, COLORADO, August 29, 2023 - Outward was awarded $156,499 to develop Free Open-Source Software for simulating Plume-Surface Interactions (PSI) relevant to lunar and Martian environments. These software tools include: 1) a two-way coupled Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and Discrete Element Method (DEM) numerical modeling framework for simulating regolith-plume interactions; 2) a grain-based DEM model of regolith ejecta with accurate representation of particle size and shape distributions to predict erosion physics; and 3) a damage calculator for identifying the location and extent of pitting and fracturing caused by ejecta impacting near- and far-field structures. These combined tools are implemented within a massively parallelized cloud-computing environment to enable high-fidelity PSI models for design of CLPS landers and Human Landing Systems.