A Westminster space company has won a NASA grant to work on space communication mission concepts for vehicles traveling to the moon and Mars. 

Advanced Space will receive roughly $850,000 over two years as part of a Phase II Small Business Innovative Research program to build mission designs for NASA’s LunaNet framework, which aims to establish reliable communications on the moon and Mars. 

The company's work builds on an earlier project it led and was funded by NASA, called the Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment. That project, its name shortened to Capstone, was meant to bolster the transfer-stage design in space missions involving small spacecraft operating in nontraditional orbits, such as low lunar orbit.

“The Phase II SBIR builds on what we learned from our CAPSTONE mission, which proved we can successfully navigate and operate in the complex orbital environment around the Moon,” Brad Cheetham, president and CEO of Advanced Space, said in a statement. “This new effort takes that experience even further — advancing technologies that will enable reliable communication and navigation for future missions and help build the foundation for sustained lunar exploration and a growing cislunar economy.”

Advanced Space, which employs about 100 people, partnered on this project with Texas-based Firefly Aerospace, which builds small and medium-sized launch vehicles. Its Elytra orbital vehicle will be used as a relay to help bolster a LunaNet. If all goes well, LunaNet’s relay network will be able to transmit data back to Earth. 

“Building on the success of our first Blue Ghost mission, Firefly is ramping up for our next two missions to the Moon that will each deploy an Elytra vehicle in lunar orbit in addition to Blue Ghost landers on the lunar surface,” Chris Clark, vice president of spacecraft at Firefly Aerospace said in a statement. “We’ll be well-positioned to provide data relay services for sustained operations anywhere on the Moon.”

The project will be managed at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

In 2022, Advanced Space's Capstone satellite made it to the moon after a thruster valve malfunction led the spacecraft to spin out of control for several days before the problem was corrected and the company could regain control. Capstone became the first very small satellite, known as a cube sat, to operate in lunar orbit.

Shortly before that mission, the company won a $72 million contract from the U.S. Air Force Research Lab to build another spacecraft, dubbed Oracle, that is meant to test experimental capabilities in space near the moon.