NASA's Artemis 1 mission concluded Sunday when the agency's Orion spacecraft splashed down in the Pacific Ocean. It's the first mission of a much larger NASA program to put humans back on the moon by 2024 — a program that several New Mexico-based companies supported.
One of those is Metis Technology Solutions. Joy Colucci, a former NASA executive and 2022 Business First Women of Influence honoree, founded Metis in 2011. She relocated her company to Albuquerque in 2014 and it has since grown to more than 150 employees.
Over 30 of those employees aided in the Space Launch System (SLS) component of the Artemis 1 mission. Metis employees helped ensure the SLS safely launched the Orion spacecraft into orbit and monitored data on the health of the spacecraft, according to a news release from the company.
Metis employees worked on launch pad safety support at Cape Canaveral, as well as NASA's Near Earth Network and Deep Space Network operations.
"The type of work we did in support of Artemis, we do that every day," Colucci said. "For example, there have been 53 launches in the last year, with 83 planned in the next 12 months. Our company oversees safety for every single one of them."
"So Artemis is important," she continued. "But every launch is important. Our staff brings that passion and talent to everything they do."
In addition to providing safety and monitoring support, Metis experts helped provide software and hardware support to design and develop a simulation facility for future moon landings, according to the company.
And Metis is already working on Artemis 2, Colucci said. Artemis 2 will send a crew of four astronauts in a capsule on a mission around the moon that's set to launch in May 2024.
Meanwhile, Santa Fe's Solstar Space Co. is lending its own technology to a later part of the Artemis program.
The company is developing an access point that will allow a secure connection between WiFi-enabled components in space and on the ground.
M. Brian Barnett, Solstar's co-founder and CEO, said that the access point is currently in the design phase. Solstar will start building it next year, he said.
Solstar's WiFi access point will be mounted inside NASA's Habitation and Logistics Outpost (HALO), Barnett said.
HALO is part of a new Lunar-orbiting space station called Gateway that's currently under development. It's "where astronauts will live and conduct research while visiting Gateway," according to NASA's website.
The actual access point is "about the size of a laptop," Barnett said. It'll provide WiFi access to astronauts inside and outside the HALO, he added.
Northrup Grumman signed a contract with NASA to develop the HALO module in July 2021; Solstar signed its own contract with Northrup Grumman in February of this year to develop the WiFi access point for HALO.
"There's a lot of private investment right now to build things on the Moon and on the lunar surface, like command rovers. We're just at the beginning of that," Barnett said. "We expect our equipment to be an important part of that infrastructure that's to be built on the lunar surface."
Barnett wants to commercialize the access point for private companies — like Blue Origin and UP Aerospace, which have used the equipment during earlier test flights — to use in their own aerospace operations. He's planning for the company's first commercial sales of the product in 2024.
There are several other NASA partner companies listed in New Mexico in both Albuquerque and Las Cruces. Those include SolAero Technologies Corp., Integra Technologies, Stoc Supply LLC, Quell Corporation, Ideal Vacuum Products LLC, Kaman Industrial Technologies, and Apache-Logical J.V. in Albuquerque, and Vista Photonics Inc. in Las Cruces.
NASA aims to launch astronauts aboard an Orion capsule as part of Artemis 2 before the end of 2024. The agency plans to announce Artemis 2 crew members early next year. The Artemis program's overall plan is to prepare the agency for future missions to Mars.
