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NASA Awards SpaceX $331.8 Million for Falcon Heavy Launch to Build the Lunar Gateway

posted by martyb on Thursday February 11 2021, @12:02AM   Printer-friendly
from the didn't-Gateway-make-PCs? dept.

takyon writes:

NASA Awards Contract to Launch Initial Elements for Lunar Outpost

NASA has selected Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) of Hawthorne, California, to provide launch services for the agency's Power and Propulsion Element (PPE) and Habitation and Logistics Outpost (HALO), the foundational elements of the Gateway. As the first long-term orbiting outpost around the Moon, the Gateway is critical to supporting sustainable astronauts missions under the agency's Artemis program.

After integration on Earth, the PPE and HALO are targeted to launch together no earlier than May 2024 on a Falcon Heavy rocket from Launch Complex 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The total cost to NASA is approximately $331.8 million, including the launch service and other mission-related costs.

The PPE is a 60-kilowatt class solar electric propulsion spacecraft that also will provide power, high-speed communications, attitude control, and the capability to move the Gateway to different lunar orbits, providing more access to the Moon's surface than ever before.

The HALO is the pressurized living quarters where astronauts who visit the Gateway, often on their way to the Moon, will work. It will provide command and control and serve as the docking hub for the outpost. HALO will support science investigations, distribute power, provide communications for visiting vehicles and lunar surface expeditions, and supplement the life support systems aboard Orion, NASA's spacecraft that will deliver Artemis astronauts to the Gateway.

The Falcon Heavy will use an extended payload fairing.

Also at Spaceflight Now, TechCrunch, Teslarati, and Wccftech.

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  • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 11 2021, @04:49AM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 11 2021, @04:49AM (#1111437)

    This is a piss poor use of tax dollars. Even giving the money to inner city niggers to buy drugs would be more productive than anything SpaceX does.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 11 2021, @08:59AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 11 2021, @08:59AM (#1111484)

    We're wasting it on SpaceX because everybody else would be charging quite literally 10 times as much for the same service. This is a striking, if seldom, example of "small government" at work, by "buying American" and using COTS services that directly support >6000 highly skilled American workers and a host of equally qualified subcontractors. Well, they could have completely skipped useless SLS before still buying SpaceX, but we can't have everything.

    If you were actually talking about the usefulness of space tracel, the complete endeavour ... well ... considering ... what has the military engegament in Afghanistan recently done for us? That costs >100 times as much (2018 numbers) ... per year ... for ten years and counting. That would also be much more lots of crack for the niggers, methinks ... won't somebody think of the drug dealers?