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Technologies for enabling NASA\u2019s Artemis mission are coming thick and fast, as plenty of problems must be solved before a permanent human presence on the Moon can be established. A novel idea from Honeybee Robotics, one of the most prominent space technology companies now owned by Blue Origin, could solve plenty of them with one piece of infrastructure. The Lunar Utility Navigation with Advanced Remote Sensing and Autonomous Beaming for Energy Redistribution, or LUNARSABER (which must have been named by someone who really likes Star Wars), is a 100m tall pole that can hold one ton of equipment on top of it. It could serve as a central power, communications, and lighting hub of an Artemis base and part of a mesh network with other places of interest on the Lunar surface.\u00a0<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n Let\u2019s start with the enabling tech of LUNARSABER itself. No rocket can hold a 100-meter-tall tower and land it on the Moon, and building such a tower on the lunar surface without any existing infrastructure would also be almost impossible. So Honeybee will leverage another existing technology\u2014the Deployable Interlocking Actuated Bands for Linear Operations, or DIABLO system (maybe someone at Honeybee also likes Blizzard Entertainment games).<\/p>\n DIABLO uses a rolled piece of metal and bends it into a deployable cylindrical structure that supports heavy payloads. In this case, that structure serves as the base for LUNARSABER. But the secret sauce is what that structure enables. Let\u2019s take a look at what goes along the sides first.<\/p>\n \n