Odyssey Moon Ventures LLC will partner with NASA to help develop a robotic lunar lander, the company announced.

The partnership was established through a Reimbursable Space Act Agreement signed with Ames Research Center. Under the agreement, NASA will provide technical data and engineering support to Odyssey Moon Ventures to support its efforts to develop its "MoonOne" (M-1) robotic lunar lander, which will have the capabilities of delivering payloads to the surface of the moon for science, exploration and commerce.

In return, Odyssey will reimburse Ames for the cost of providing the technical support and will share its technical data from its engineering tests and actual lunar missions with NASA.

"The prospect for commercial delivery of NASA science and exploration instruments to the moon is consistent with precedents already set by the NASA COTS [Commercial Orbital Transport Services] program supporting commercial supply for orbital operations," said Ames Research Center Director S. Pete Worden.

"Extending commercial supplier concepts and relationships to advance NASA’s mandates for exploration and permanent operations on the moon is a logical next step."

The MoonOne lander will be adapted from a small spacecraft system under development at Ames called the Common Spacecraft Bus, which uses an innovative modular design adaptable to a variety of mission configurations as either an orbiter or a lander.

Under the partnering agreement, NASA will share technical data and provide engineering support to Odyssey. NASA also will share data from the Hover Test Vehicle, an engineering prototype of the Common Spacecraft Bus developed at Ames to evaluate hardware and software systems through rapid prototyping and ground-based testing.

Odyssey Moon Ventures will focus on the commercialization of the NASA technology to develop a series of robotic missions to the Moon during the International Lunar Decade.

Odyssey Moon has already signed on two commercial organizations for the mission, and the company has since received proposals for payloads from customers worldwide.