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The Moon may soon have its first railway system, with NASA looking to develop a reliable, autonomous, and efficient payload transport network.
A durable, long-life robotic transport system will be critical to the daily operations of a sustainable lunar base in the 2030’s, as envisioned in NASA’s Moon to Mars plan and mission concepts like the Robotic Lunar Surface Operations 2 (RLSO2).
The FLOAT — Flexible Levitation on a Track — will be developed to transport payloads around the lunar base and to and from landing zones or other outposts as well as for moving local natural resources mined on the Moon.
How will the system work?
The FLOAT system will employ unpowered magnetic robots that levitate over a 3-layer flexible film track: a graphite layer enables robots to passively float over tracks using diamagnetic levitation, a flex-circuit layer generates electromagnetic thrust to controllably propel robots along tracks, and an optional thin-film solar panel layer generates power for the base when in sunlight.
FLOAT tracks will unroll directly onto the lunar regolith to avoid major on-site construction — unlike conventional roads, railways, or cableways.
A large-scale FLOAT system will be capable of moving up to 1,00,000s of kilograms of regolith/payload multiple kilometres per day.
Work on the project will begin with designing, manufacturing and testing a series of sub-scale robot/track prototypes, culminating with a demonstration in a lunar-analog testbed. The impact of environmental factors like temperature and radiation on system performance and longevity will be investigated and a technology roadmap will be defined to ensure mature manufacturing capability for critical hardware.
Float was first proposed in 2021 under NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) programme.
