Astroport Space Technologies

Astroport Space Technologies, headquartered in San Antonio, Texas and founded in 2020, is a lunar surface infrastructure company developing sintering and construction technologies that use in-situ lunar regolith — the abundant surface soil covering the Moon — to manufacture load-bearing pads, roads, berms, and structural elements directly on the lunar surface, eliminating the need to launch heavy construction materials from Earth.

The fundamental challenge Astroport addresses is landing pad erosion: when rockets land or launch on the Moon's loose, unconsolidated regolith surface, the high-velocity exhaust plumes create a 'sandblasting' effect that ejects rocks and debris at high speed in all directions — a known risk for other nearby surface assets that could be damaged by ballistic projectiles. NASA's Artemis architecture, with multiple landers operating near permanent bases, requires hardened landing pads to prevent successive missions from destroying each other's equipment.

The cost of shipping concrete or metal landing pad panels from Earth (at roughly $10,000-50,000 per kilogram in launch costs) makes conventional construction materials prohibitively expensive.

Astroport's approach is microwave sintering: a rover-mounted microwave emitter heats regolith in place to approximately 1000-1200°C, fusing the individual soil particles into a solid ceramic-like material without requiring imported binders or water. Lunar regolith contains silica, iron, aluminum, and other minerals that vitrify under heating, creating a hard, porous structure with sufficient compressive strength to support spacecraft loads and erosion-resistant enough to deflect exhaust plumes. The rover autonomously drives back and forth over a landing zone, sequentially sintering strip by strip to build up a hardened surface.

Astroport has received NASA SBIR contracts for regolith sintering technology development and terrestrial demonstration in simulated regolith test beds. The company competes with ICON (which uses 3D printing for lunar construction) and Masten Space Systems' former regolith processing work in the lunar ISRU and construction market.