Colmena: Mexico’s mission to catapult robots onto the moon

“Eight years ago, we weren’t even thinking about the moon, now to have it so tangible, the mission to send something up there just around the corner, it’s going to be very exciting,” said Juan Carlos Sánchez, a master’s student working on Colmena. 

“You see it, and it’s real, the things that you dream are finally real,” he said. “I think many of us had dreams as kids, and we haven’t let those dreams die, but kept working on them. We’ll never lose them.”

The team at Astrobotic was impressed by the uniqueness of the science behind Colmena. Senior payload systems engineer Jodi Coletti said it has been fun to work with Medina’s team.

“Some of their science has been really interesting, because they didn’t have as much money as some of the other big space companies,” said Coletti. “The things that they came up with that worked really well were just much more simple. Sometimes if you have more money, you think more complicated, just because you can.”

And therein lies the real goal of Colmena. While Medina and his team of creative engineers are definitely interested in the readings the robots’ sensors will take, their ultimate purpose is to show what Mexico’s space program is capable of doing.

The Colmena mission is Mexico’s way of getting its foot in the door during a moment of space exploration that is “quite a bit of a free-for-all right now,” according to Walter Harris, chief scientist at the Arizona Space Institute at the University of Arizona.

While low-Earth and geosynchronous orbits have been commercialized for some decades now, the next step of sending commercial spacecraft to the moon and beyond is “unquestionably very new,” Harris said. “It’s really an exciting time. There are a lot of different approaches that people are taking.”

In 1979, several governments signed what is known as the Moon Agreement, which stipulates that lunar activities be governed by international law. But there were three notable exceptions. The only countries to have ever operated on the lunar surface — the United States, Russia and China — are non-parties. 

For Medina, treaties like this and the Artemis Accords (Mexico is a party to both) are important, but they are also mere political acts. 

“At the international level, there are no laws,” he said. “It’s basically survival of the fittest, whether we like it or not. And what power would we have to influence legal regulation if we’re just doing dialectical exercises? None. You have to go there and be an actor. When you do that, you have the chance to influence it.”

Colmena is poised to prove that Mexico can do more in space than sign treaties on Earth. 

“Mexico is a champion of signing papers, but we have already been developing a mission that is ready to go now, the first in a series of missions,” said Medina. “We have a plan, so we can participate with technology.”

Future missions will involve sending even larger “hives” of robots. Medina imagines a million tiny, simple robots coming together to perform complicated tasks like mining asteroids, similar to how hives of bees or colonies of ants — each a very simple individual unit — come together to achieve more than the sum of their parts. 

“Bees, ants, worms — these are the great modifiers of the planet,” Medina said. “And if you look at a single individual, no one of them is tremendously intelligent or sophisticated. Each is fine-tuned to perform a specific task. But they are extremely efficient at what they do.”

Such design avoids a single-point failure. If one large, sophisticated and expensive robot fails, it can tank an entire mission. But if a mission of a million tiny robots loses 100,000, the other 900,000 can still carry out their function.

“There’s no boss, they self-organize,” Medina said. “So it may take longer, but the mission hasn’t failed.”

The success of Colmena is not only of serious importance to Medina and his team, or even to Mexico’s space program, but to the country as a whole. It’s about planting the seeds of prosperity for the country’s overall future. 

“What tends to happen in emerging economy countries, whether it be with good or bad intentions, is that they only focus on problems of the present,” Medina said. “If you only focus all your efforts and all your financial resources on solving problems of the present, you’re never going to solve them, because you don’t have the resources to do so.”

That’s why Mexico must take advantage of the current window of opportunity before it closes for good.

“This isn’t your average moment, historically speaking,” he said. “We’re at a watershed moment in our social evolution. So if you don’t make these decisions now, you will probably lose your chance to make them.”

Astrobotic CEO John Thornton also recognized the importance of Colmena to Mexico and said that he and his company are proud to be a part of the mission.

"Mexico could be the fourth nation after China to operate on the surface of the moon with our mission," said Thornton. "And we're very excited and honored to be a part of that historic moment for them as a nation."

Follow @copycopeland

Subscribe to Closing Arguments

Sign up for new weekly newsletter Closing Arguments to get the latest about ongoing trials, major litigation and hot cases and rulings in courthouses around the U.S. and the world.

Email *

Submit