Autumn Lui is helping direct one of JPL’s strangest, most audacious missions.

She is deputy project manager for MoonFall, a proposed NASA mission aiming to deliver four propulsive drones to the lunar South Pole. No rotors. No propellers. The Moon has no usable atmosphere, leaving nothing for a helicopter blade to bite into.

Flight there requires pure rocket thrust.

Each craft measures roughly seven feet across and weighs about 550 pounds with fuel. They are built to leap, firing thrusters to arc over boulders and crater rims before touching down again. Over a series of short ballistic hops, the four vehicles could cover 50 kilometers, mapping possible Artemis landing zones and dropping into permanently shadowed terrain that wheeled rovers may never reach.

They would carry high definition cameras capable of mapping the surface down to the centimeter, along with sensors to measure radiation and search for water ice hidden in places sunlight never reaches.

Autumn came to this work after years immersed in deep space power systems for Europa Clipper, where she helped oversee the spacecraft’s Power Control Distribution Assembly, part of the machinery responsible for keeping one of NASA’s most ambitious planetary missions alive as it travels toward Jupiter.

I photographed Autumn at JPL beside one of the MoonFall test vehicles.

There is something wonderfully bold about the machine. A flyer engineered for an airless desert, crossing a world where flight means pitting raw chemical thrust against gravity, lifting off, arcing through black sky, and landing again on ground no human foot has ever touched.