Redwire’s team was selected to compete in NASA’s Break the Ice Lunar Challenge, qualifying for Phase II Level 2 of the competition.

The goal of NASA’s Break the Ice Challenge design challenge is to further the development of excavation and transport technologies on the lunar surface by inviting teams from across the world to play a role in building sustainable human presence and thriving economy on the Moon using resources already there.

Phase I of the challenge allowed teams to submit their mature design architecture for mining lunar regolith and extracting water to enable sustainable surface operations, and Phase II focuses specifically on durability and excavation capabilities and includes prototype build and test of full-size terrestrial rovers

Redwire’s winning system includes a Lunar Regolith Excavator (L-Rex) to excavate large amounts of icy regolith and a versatile, low-mass transportation rover called Lunar Transporter (L-Tran) responsible for deploying the excavator and delivering regolith and ice.

All U.S. teams moving onto Level 2 will receive equal shares of NASA’s $500,000 prize purse for Level 1 and in Level 2, qualifying teams will test their prototypes at a location of their choosing for a shot at $1 million. Phase II concludes with the Level 3 head-to-head NASA onsite competition for a shot at $1.5 million in prizes.

Learn more about Redwire’s submission for Break the Ice in this blog. 

Read the full press release from NASA here.