Pittsburgh’s North Side neighborhood will be a little closer to the moon next year.
Astrobotic Technology Inc., a lunar tech company that specializes in sending payloads to space, announced Thursday it was moving from its office in the Cultural District in Downtown to Manchester, a neighborhood in the North Side a short distance from Heinz Field and Carnegie Science Center. The company plans to move in May 2020.
The new location will give the company more space to build and test landers and rovers that are heading to the moon, as well as operate the equipment from the same building.
Astrobotic will create the equipment in Pittsburgh; send it to Cape Canaveral, Fla., where it will be launched into space; and then maneuver the equipment around the moon from its control center in Manchester.
“This is a state-of-the-art facility to build landers to fly to the moon,” Astrobotic CEO John Thornton said. “There’s plenty of other space facilities, but this one is designed directly around that.”
The 47,000-square-foot facility on North Lincoln Avenue will feature room to work on most every part of the production process — from a machine shop that will manufacture parts to a lab to assemble and test batteries to simulations of the environments that landers and rovers will experience while in space.
The facility can support four lunar lander missions simultaneously, according to a news release announcing the move.
Astrobotic, a Carnegie Mellon University spinoff, has been planning the move for a long time, Mr. Thornton said. The company had previously been headquartered in the Strip District before moving into rented space Downtown for less than a year while it waited for the Manchester location deal to be finalized.
Although Astrobotic is working on renovations, Mr. Thornton said the building already had a “good backbone,” with good infrastructure, good internet and power capability, and a cleanroom already built in.
A cleanroom is used to reduce dust, something that is extra important when building landers. If there is dust on the spacecraft when the vehicle is in space, that dust would easily lift off and could then settle on sensors or other important equipment, Mr. Thornton said.
The building was sold to Astrobotic for $3.85 million in October, according to data from Allegheny County.
Mr. Thornton said Astrobotic is looking at offering tours of its new facility and is having conversations about partnerships with Heinz Field and Carnegie Science Center.
In the meantime, the company is pouring energy into preparing its Peregrine lunar lander for a trip to the moon in July 2021.
The lander will carry 28 payloads from different companies, universities, governments and nonprofits to do things like gather data about the lunar surface, stream video from the moon back to Earth and deposit time capsules to leave a piece of Pittsburgh in space.
Organizations bought space on the lander for $1.2 million per kilogram. In May, NASA selected Astrobotic for a $79.5 million contract to deliver 14 payloads on its Peregrine lander. The lander will carry 90 kilograms of payloads this time, with plans to increase its load each time it heads to the moon.
“Things are tracking well right now,” Mr. Thornton said. “We’re ready to go. Countdown has started, and we’re going to be landing on the moon in two years.”
First Published: December 12, 2019, 5:24 p.m.
