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posted by mrpg on Tuesday November 20 2018, @03:15AM   Printer-friendly
from the to-the-moon-and-back dept.

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

NASA to pay private space companies for moon rides

Next month, almost a half-century since the United States last landed a spacecraft on the moon, NASA is expected to announce plans for a return. But the agency will just be along for the ride. Rather than unveiling plans for its own spacecraft, NASA will name the private companies it will pay to carry science experiments to the moon on small robotic landers.

Under a program called Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS), NASA would buy space aboard a couple of launches a year, starting in 2021. The effort is similar to an agency program that paid private space companies such as Elon Musk's SpaceX to deliver cargo to the International Space Station (ISS). "This a new way of doing business," says Sarah Noble, a planetary scientist at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C., who is leading the science side of NASA's lunar plans.

Scientists are lining up for a ride. "It really feels like the future of lunar exploration," says Erica Jawin, a planetary scientist at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. She and other attendees at the annual meeting of the Lunar Exploration Analysis Group in Columbia, Maryland, last week were eager to show NASA why their small experiments would be worthy hitchhikers on the landers.


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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by c0lo on Tuesday November 20 2018, @09:06AM

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday November 20 2018, @09:06AM (#764183) Journal

    I fear that Nasa is selling out to whores, and not just SpaceX (Whores to the Galaxy!, and Boring)

    Why exactly do you complain? NASA never built their own rockets, it was buying expandable rockets from other 'whores' (Russian ones included) until recently. Here [wikipedia.org], find me one rocket that was manufactured by NASA in that list.

    Saturn V [wikipedia.org], the one used to put the first man on the Moon:

    The Saturn V was principally designed by the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, although numerous major systems, including propulsion, were designed by subcontractors.
    ...
    Manufacturers
    Boeing (S-IC)
    North American (S-II)
    Douglas (S-IVB)

    --
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
    Starting Score:    1  point
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