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Five New Players are Now in NASA's Race to Send Landers to the Moon

posted by martyb on Wednesday November 20 2019, @04:59AM   
from the things-are-looking-up dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

A total of 14 companies have now entered the race to develop landers to deliver goodies to the Moon as NASA plans to send the first woman and the next man to our nearest rocky companion by 2024.

Five vendors joined the growing list on Monday, according to a media teleconference broadcast on NASA Live.

Some of the most recognizable names include Blue Origin and SpaceX, founded by tech billionaires Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. Other lesser known corps include Ceres Robotics, geared towards AI and space robots, Tyvak Nano-Satellite Systems, focused on building tiny satellites and CubeSat products, both based in California, and the Sierra Nevada Corporation, an aerospace biz based in Nevada.

NASA regularly searches for companies to partner with for its spaceflights. None are more prestigious than crewed missions. The Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative was set up for candidates to win prized contracts to help NASA with its goal of launching the first woman and man onto the Moon as part of its Artemis program.

“The CLPS initiative was designed to leverage the expertise and innovation of private industry to get to the Moon quickly,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of the Science Mission Directorate at NASA. “As we build a steady cadence of deliveries, we’ll expand our ability to do new science on the lunar surface, develop new technologies, and support human exploration objectives.”

“Buying rides to the Moon to conduct science investigations and test new technology systems, instead of owning the delivery systems, enables NASA to do much more, sooner and for less cost, while being one of many customers on our commercial partners’ landers,” Steve Clarke, deputy associate administrator for exploration in NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, added.

[...] The CLPS contracts have a total combined value of a $2.6bn. The 14 companies in the pool will be allowed to bid for contracts, and NASA will award them based on technical capabilities, price, and schedule.

Also covered at Ars Technica: One part of NASA seems serious about fostering aerospace innovation and Space News.

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Original Submission

• Re:ffgfgfbb Re:ffgfgfbb (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 20 2019, @04:31PM (1 child)

  by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 20 2019, @04:31PM (#922430)

  WAY further back than the 70's. It was a major mission design decision in the early 60's. Von Braun wanted to do a rendezvous mission for assembly/fueling before going to the moon, but the program decided to do it in one shot with a really big rocket.

  Here is a paper [si.edu] that goes in detail. The paper abstract (in case you can't access it):

  Wernher von Braun’s historic talk at Huntsville on June 7, 1962, when he endorsed “lunar-orbit rendezvous” (LOR) as the mode for landing on the Moon, has long been seen as one of the most critical dates in the Apollo program. It effectively ended a months-long, divisive debate inside NASA over LOR versus “earth-orbit rendezvous” (EOR) versus “direct ascent” (a single huge rocket to launch a lander directly at the Moon, with no rendezvous). Von Braun and his Marshall Space Flight Center had a long-standing commitment to EOR. While historians have long emphasized the significance of this surprise endorsement of LOR, there has been little analysis of how and when he arrived at that decision.

  This paper will discuss the process by which von Braun finally picked LOR in the spring of 1962 and attempts to pinpoint the date of that decision. However, it also examines his long prehistory of Moon proposals, beginning in public with his October 1952 Collier’s articles. In 1961, after President Kennedy’s endorsement of the Apollo landing goal, he leaned toward EOR primarily because he did not want to build the huge launch vehicle required for direct ascent. He only gradually and somewhat reluctantly changed his mind. How that came about is the fundamental substance of this paper.

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• Re:ffgfgfbb (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 20 2019, @04:47PM

  by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 20 2019, @04:47PM (#922441)

  That is an awesome read. Thanks!

  Parent