Telespazio Benelux, a subsidiary of Telespazio, a Leonardo (67%) and Thales company (33%), has been selected by the European Space Agency (ESA) to design, build and deliver the ground infrastructure for PROSPECT, a mission that will drill into the lunar south pole in search of water ice and various volatiles, with a drill developed and built by Leonardo.
Telespazio Benelux will act as prime contractor, leading a consortium that brings together EarthLab Luxembourg (Luxembourg) and Astro42 (Hungary).
PROSPECT will travel to the Moon in 2027 aboard an Intuitive Machines Nova-C lander, as part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services programme. Once on the surface, an ESA-led drill and miniature laboratory will extract and analyse samples from up to about one metre below ground, looking for water ice and other volatiles.
The mission will be planned, commanded and monitored from the PROSPECT Operations Centre (POC) at ESA’s technical heart in Noordwijk, the Netherlands (ESTEC), and it is this operations centre that the Telespazio Benelux consortium will deliver.
PROSPECT will operate for only about ten Earth days on the lunar surface, with no opportunity for repair and very little margin for error. The ground infrastructure must therefore monitor the mission second by second, support rapid re-planning, and remain available throughout the critical operations window.
As prime contractor, Telespazio Benelux is responsible for overall project and systems-engineering management, the design of the operations control room at ESTEC, the secure external interfaces that connect the centre to Intuitive Machines, the integration of mission-specific hardware, and the preparation of operations.
Astro42 leads the backend of the platform: the cloud-native compute, storage and network infrastructure built on Kubernetes, together with the “multi-mission” design that allows the same centre to serve future missions. Astro42 is also delivering “POC-in-a-Box,” compact portable units that replicate the centre’s core services on a single workstation as an operational fallback.
EarthLab Luxembourg is responsible for deploying and integrating the mission’s ground-segment software onto the platform, and for the continuous monitoring and maintenance that keep it healthy.
“Bringing a European payload to the surface of the Moon demands a ground segment that performs flawlessly in a mission window measured in days,” said Justas Tamosiunas, project manager at Telespazio Benelux. “We are proud that ESA has entrusted us with delivering that infrastructure, and we have assembled a consortium that pairs our heritage in operational ground systems with some of Europe’s strongest cloud-native engineering.”
“A mission this short leaves no time to react to surprises, so visibility into the platform is everything,” said Mohamed Boukhebouze, project manager at EarthLab Luxembourg. “Our role is to deploy the mission software and keep the whole system under continuous watch, applying the same monitoring and service discipline we run every day for European space programmes.”
“We are building the digital backbone that the mission runs on: a cloud-native platform designed to stay rock-solid under pressure, and to outlast a single mission,” said Balazs Slezak, CEO of Astro42. “For a Hungarian engineering team, contributing that to a Moon mission alongside Telespazio Benelux is a real milestone.”