NASA's CAPSTONE Completes Extended Mission Testing Lunar Technologies¶
Page: NASA article by Korine Powers (SCaN Program office writer), 6 July 2026.
https://www.nasa.gov/technology/space-comms/nasas-capstone-completes-extended-mission-testing-lunar-technologies/.
Fetched 2026-10-02T04:02:28Z. File:
sources/moon-base/nasa-gov-technology-space-comms-nasas-capstone-completes-extended-mission-testing-lunar-te.md.
Summary. The end of NASA's work on the first CAPSTONE (launched June 2022), after a 15-month extension in which it tested autonomous navigation (autoNGC, with optical navigation) and delay/disruption tolerant networking (DTN) at the Moon. This is the 2022 spacecraft, not CAPSTONE 02, the two-spacecraft mission for 2027 on Missions and assets. Its only tie to the Moon Base is an image caption. Its content is on SCaN Networks.
Key points¶
- The mission. CAPSTONE "became the first U.S. commercial mission at the Moon". It "tested operations in three-body orbits around the Moon" and "became the first spacecraft to fly and characterize this orbit for future exploration and science missions". (The article doesn't name the orbit.) Built by Terran Orbital, owned and operated by Advanced Space; managed by RTMD's Small Spacecraft and Distributed Systems program at Ames; the extended-mission demonstrations by "NASA's SCaN Division".
- autoNGC. Software "designed to allow a spacecraft to determine where it is, where it is going, and how to get where it needs to be without waiting for instructions from the ground"; first tested at the Moon on CAPSTONE. While the Deep Space Network supported Artemis II, CAPSTONE's contact "dropped to just a few passes per week"; using "an onboard star tracker camera to image the Moon, Earth, and other celestial bodies", optical navigation "at times outperformed ground-based methods for real-time onboard navigation".
- DTN. "storing information on the spacecraft when no connection is available and automatically forwarding it once communications are restored". CAPSTONE was "the first to fly the latest DTN protocols beyond Earth orbit and the first to run them in NASA's core Flight System". In one test an interrupted transfer resumed automatically: "Every piece of data made it home."
- For the surface, as said by a Near Space Network engineer, Ben Anderson: "You can imagine an astronaut walking behind a lunar hill or descending into a crater and temporarily losing connectivity. This technology allows that data to be automatically retransmitted once communications are restored."
- The Moon Base tie: a caption under a Moon Base render: "The technologies CAPSTONE tested may be key to NASA's growing lunar communications and navigation infrastructure."
- End: "NASA's activities on CAPSTONE concluded in June 2026, while Advanced Space will continue to use the spacecraft as a technology development testbed."
What it doesn't say¶
NRHO, Gateway, LunaNet, or any Moon Base phase or mission.