AstroLab

Astrolab, Inc., operating under the trade name Venturi Astrolab Inc., is a private American aerospace company headquartered in Hawthorne, California, and incorporated in Delaware. It designs, builds and operates robotic mobility systems for planetary exploration, focused on a fleet of multi-purpose commercial rovers intended to support surface logistics on the Moon and Mars.

The company's flagship platform is the Flexible Logistics and Exploration (FLEX) rover, a medium-capacity surface mobility vehicle designed for exploration, logistics, construction and scientific operations. A second vehicle, FLIP (FLEX Lunar Innovation Platform), was developed as a smaller lunar demonstration payload after the cancellation of NASA's VIPER mission on Astrobotic's Griffin lander, and is intended to validate FLEX subsystems including avionics, autonomous navigation and power systems while gathering data on lunar dust mitigation and surface operations.

Astrolab positions FLEX as the Lunar Terrain Vehicle Service (LTVS) vehicle for building a lunar economy, and maintains a Hawthorne facility used for hardware testing alongside terrestrial field testing campaigns in which external partners can fly payloads.

Founding story

Astrolab was founded in January 2020 by Jaret B. Matthews, an aerospace engineer who previously spent seven years at SpaceX as manager of the Dragon Spacecraft Mechanisms development team, where he led development of the docking system used by Crew Dragon, and a decade before that in NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Robotic Vehicles Group working on the Mars Exploration Rovers and Mars Science Laboratory mobility systems. Matthews envisioned a reusable, modular mobility system to support human and robotic activity beyond Earth, and co-led the company with Chief Engineer Rius Billing.

Business model

Astrolab designs, builds and operates a fleet of commercial planetary rovers, providing lunar and Mars mobility and logistics services rather than selling vehicles outright, and hosts customer payloads on its vehicles via a modular Universal Payload Interface. Government contracts, notably NASA's Lunar Terrain Vehicle Services program, are a principal source of work.

Revenue sources indicated include NASA contract awards under the Lunar Terrain Vehicle Services and lunar surface programs, commercial rover mission contracts, and payload accommodation on its rovers.

Traction

Astrolab exited stealth in March 2022, won a 2023 contract for the first commercial FLEX rover mission slated for delivery to the Moon as early as December 2026 on a SpaceX Starship, received an April 2024 NASA award under the Lunar Terrain Vehicle Services program, and in December 2024 its rover underwent testing at NASA. In February 2025 it secured a ride for the FLIP rover on Astrobotic's Griffin-1 lander, and in May 2026 was part of a NASA award for the CLV-1 Lunar Terrain Vehicle.

Latest developments

In August 2025 Interlune indicated the FLIP rover would carry a multispectral camera it designed to search for helium-3 on the Moon. In October and December 2025 the FLIP mission was reported delayed, with the vehicle in thermal-vacuum and integrated functional testing. In May 2026 NASA awarded a Lunar Terrain Vehicle contract for the CLV-1 rover to Astrolab together with Axiom Space, Interlune and Odyssey Space Research.