NASA to accept new Artemis lunar lander proposals from commercial companies

Back in April 2021, NASA chose SpaceX to develop a lunar lander that will take astronauts to the moon for its future Artemis missions. SpaceX’s vehicle won’t be the only one flying astronauts to the surface of the Moon, though: NASA has announced that it’s welcoming proposals from American companies for landers that can take human spacefarers from the Gateway station in the lunar orbit to the Moon itself. By having that capability, the lander design can be used for missions beyond Artemis III, which will be the first crewed landing on the Moon since Apollo 17.

In its announcement, the agency said it’s also exercising an option under its existing contract with SpaceX and is asking the company to change the landing system it proposed to meet the new requirement. “Pursuing more development work under the original contract maximizes NASA’s investment and partnership with SpaceX,” the agency said. Having a second lunar lander “provides redundancy in services” and can help ensure reliable transportation for astronauts that will be part of future lunar missions.

While the call for a second lunar lander is new, the plan to have more than one company working on the project isn’t. NASA was originally supposed to choose more than one lunar lander provider for Artemis, but the agency didn’t receive enough funding from Congress, prompting it to go with SpaceX alone. 

Blue Origin, one of the finalists for the contract, filed a complaint with the US Court of Federal Claims, calling the decision “fundamentally unfair.” The Jeff Bezos-owned space corporation argued that NASA allowed SpaceX to modify its bid and wasn’t given the same chance to do so. To note, the contract SpaceX won was worth $2.9 billion, while Blue Origin’s bid was almost twice that at $5.9 billion. NASA believed Blue Origin bid high on purpose on the assumption that NASA would haggle and that it would receive more funding than it did. While the court dismissed Blue Origin’s lawsuit in November, SpaceX had to pause work on the lander twice, losing months in the process. When NASA pushed back the Artemis III mission to 2025, NASA administrator Bill Nelson said Blue Origin’s lawsuit was partly to blame.

NASA will issue a draft solicitation for the second lunar lander in the coming weeks before issuing a formal request for proposals this summer.

Lisa Watson-Morgan, NASA’s Human Landing System Program manager, said:

“This strategy expedites progress toward a long-term, sustaining lander capability as early as the 2026 or 2027 timeframe. We expect to have two companies safely carry astronauts in their landers to the surface of the Moon under NASA’s guidance before we ask for services, which could result in multiple experienced providers in the market.”

Earth’s orbital economy of tomorrow could be worth trillions

As the scope and focus of human spaceflight has evolved, so too have NASA’s methods and operations. Regions that were once accessible only by the world’s most powerful nations are today increasingly within reach of Earth’s civilian population, the richest uppermost crusts, at least. The business community is also eyeing near Earth space as the next potentially multi-trillion dollar economy and is already working with the space agency to develop the technology and infrastructure necessary to continue NASA’s work in the decades following the ISS’ decommissioning. At SXSW 2022 last week, a panel of experts on the burgeoning private spaceflight industry discussed the nuts and bolts of NASA’s commercial services program and what business in LEO will likely entail.

As part of the panel, The Commercial Space Age Is Here, Tim Crain, CTO of Intuitive Machines, Douglas Terrier, associate director of vision and technology of NASA’s Johnson Space Center, and Matt Ondler, CTO and director of engineering at Axiom Space, sat down with Houston Spaceport director, Arturo Machuca. Houston has been a spacefaring hub since NASA’s founding and remains a hotbed for orbital and spacelift technology startups today.

“We’re going from a model of where we’ve had primarily government funded interests in space to one that’s going to be focused a lot on the commercial sector,” Terrier said, pointing out that Axiom, Intuitive Machines, and “SpaceX down in Boca Chica” were quickly being joined by myriad startups offering a variety of support and development services.

“[Space is] the most important frontier for the United States to continue to have world leadership in and our goal is to ensure that we continue to do that in a new model that involves harnessing the innovation and the expertise from both inside and outside of NASA in the community represented here,” he continued.

Axiom is no stranger to working with both sides of the government contractor dynamic. It is scheduled to launch the first fully private crew mission to the ISS in April and plans to build, launch and affix a privately funded habitat module to the station by 2028. “This commercial space, very similar to the beginning of the internet,” Older explained. “There were a few key technologies that really allowed the internet to explode and so there’s a few things in aerospace that will really allow commercial space to take off.”

“We think that the low Earth orbit economy is a trillion dollar economy, whether it’s bioprinting, organs, whether it’s making special fiber optic cable,” he continued. “I am completely convinced that 15 to 20 years from now we’re going to be surrounded by objects that we can’t imagine how we [had] lived without that were manufactured in space.”

“For the last 20 years humans have lived on the International Space Station continuously,” Terrier agreed. “My grandchildren are living in a world where humans live on the moon, where they’ll get a nightly news broadcast from the moon? I mean, the opportunities from a societal- and civilization-changing standpoint is beyond comparison.. is actually beyond comprehension.”

The space-based economy is already valued at around $400 billion, Terrier added, with government investment accounting for around a quarter of the necessary upkeep funding and the rest coming from the private sector. He noted that NASA plays two primary roles as President Kennedy dictated in his 1962 “Why Go to the Moon” speech at Rice University: the scientific exploration of space for one, but also “to create the conditions for commercial success for United States in space,” Terrier said.

“It’s synergistic in a sense that the more companies operating in space, the more of an industrial base we can call on — driving the price down, amortizing the access to space — so that NASA doesn’t have to bear that cost,” he said. “It creates a role where there are things like exploring out among the planets, for which there isn’t a business case — clearly the government needs to take the lead there. And then there are things where we’re now commercializing low Earth orbit and that is success for everybody.”

This won’t be the first time that the US government hands off control of technology it previously had monopoly power over, Crain added. He points to NACA as “NASA for aviation in the 20s” and guided the government’s commercialization of aircraft technology.

“The only reason we can build a commercial space station is because of 25 years of flying the international space station and all the things that we’ve learned from NASA,” Ondler said. “NASA has learned about keeping humans alive [in space] for long periods of time. We’re really leveraging so much history and so much of the government’s investment to build our commercial station.”

Ondler pointed out that construction of the 7-foot x 3-foot Earth Observatory window being installed in Axiom’s station module, “by far the largest space window ever attempted,” would not have been possible without the knowledge and coaching of a former NASA space shuttle engineer. “her expertise, just her helping an engineer in one little area,” Ondler said, “allowed him to design a really good window on his first try.”

“We definitely stand on the shoulder of the great work that the space community has done until now, in terms of technology,” Crain agreed. The Apollo era, he notes, was dominated by producing one-off spacecraft parts meticulously designed for often singular use cases but that system is no longer sufficient. “The more we can make our supply chain, not custom parts, but things that have already been used already in a terrestrial market, the better off we are,” he said.

“Our mindset has to shift from ‘well, let’s go all in, I’m building this first lander’ to doing it the first time already looking at the second lander,” Crain continued. “What are the differences between the two, how do we regularize that production in a way so that our design, the core of that vehicle, is basically the same from flight to flight?”

Once the Artemis missions begin in earnest, that supply chain will begin to stretch and expand. It will extend first to LEO, but should attempts to colonize the moon prove successful, it will grow to support life and business there, much like how towns continually grew along the trade and expansion routes of the American West. “You don’t load up your wagons in Virginia and go straight to San Francisco,” Terrier said. “You stop in Saint Louis and reprovision, and people build up an economy around that.”

“The cool thing is that it’s not just aerospace engineering anymore,” Crain added. He noted that, for example, retinal implants can be more accurately and efficiently printed in microgravity than they can planetside, but the commercial process for actually doing so has yet to be devised. “There’s a completely different industry that we’re gonna need. Folks to figure out, how do we build that [retinal implant printing] machine? How do we bring it and the raw materials up and down [from LEO]? We need marketing people and all those sort of folks. It’s not just aerospace engineering and I think that’s really what we mean when we talk about the trillion dollar economy.”

NASA’s SLS Moon rocket arrives at launch pad for the first time

NASA’s Space Launch System has finally reached the pad — although an actual launch is still some ways off. The SLS rocket and the Orion spacecraft it carries arrived at Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Pad 39B for the first time at 4:15AM Eastern today (March 18th) for one last test before the uncrewed (and delayed) Artemis I mission to the Moon. The team will conduct a “wet dress rehearsal” that replicates the mission short of liftoff, including the propellant load, countdown procedures and draining tanks.

The test will help NASA set an exact target launch date for Artemis I. The SLS won’t stay out for very long., though, as the agency plans to roll it back to the Vehicle Assembly Building several days after the test. There, crews will remove rehearsal sensors , top up batteries, add “late-load” cargo and conduct final checks. The rocket will return to the launch pad about a week before the real launch, tentatively slated for May or later.

The preliminary deployment still marks a few important milestones. NASA officially began development of the SLS in 2011, and spent over $23 billion (in 2021 dollars) on the project in roughly a decade — the launch pad rollout shows the investment is finally bearing fruit. It’s also an important moment for Orion, which is edging closer to crewed flights.

More importantly, the arrival indicates that the next chapter of NASA’s exploratory missions is about to begin. The SLS will not only be used for Artemis missions, but is expected to serve as NASA’s primary deep space exploration launcher throughout the 2020s. As important as private rockets like SpaceX’s Starship may be, it’s likely the SLS that will carry the most historic missions in the years ahead.

The ESA suspends its ExoMars joint mission with Russia

The ExoMars mission has been suspended. Its future is uncertain at this point in time, as the European Space Agency looks for a way to proceed without the involvement of Russian space agency Roscosmos. The ESA previously announced that it’s fully implementing sanctions imposed on Russia by its member states following the country’s invasion of Ukraine and that a 2022 launch for the ExoMars rover was looking unlikely. Now, the mission has officially been put on ice after the ESA’s ruling council met in Paris to assess the situation.

The ESA said in a statement:

“As an intergovernmental organisation mandated to develop and implement space programmes in full respect with European values, we deeply deplore the human casualties and tragic consequences of the aggression towards Ukraine. While recognising the impact on scientific exploration of space, ESA is fully aligned with the sanctions imposed on Russia by its Member States.”

The council has determined that it’s impossible to keep cooperating with Roscosmos and has ordered the ESA Director General to take steps to suspend the operation. In addition, the council authorized the Director General to conduct and fast track an industrial study to find options on how the agency can move forward with ExoMars.

ExoMars is a two part mission, and the agencies sent its first spacecraft — the Trace Gas Orbiter — to Martian orbit back in 2016. They were supposed to launch a rover named after scientist Rosalind Franklin this year for the second part of the program after delays causes in part by the COVID-19 pandemic. The ESA was in charge of developing the rover, which was going to use a Russian launch vehicle and lander. 

This is just one of the space programs affected by the war in Ukraine. Roscosmos previously pulled out of the Guiana Space Center in retaliation for EU’s sanctions and also refused to launch OneWeb internet satellites that were supposed to head to orbit on Soyuz rockets. Dmitry Rogozin, the Director General of Roscosmos, also claimed that the sanctions against Russia could interrupt the operations of the country’s spacecraft that’s steering the ISS and could cause the station to “fall down into the sea or onto land. Russia stopped supplying the US with rocket engines, as well. At the time, Rogozin said “Let them fly on something else, their broomsticks.”

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope passes key optics tests

Astronomers can breathe a little easier. NASA has confirmed the James Webb Space Telescope has passed checks and tests verifying its optical performance following a “fine phasing” alignment on March 11th. There also aren’t any critical problems or detectable blockages. Optical systems are performing “at, or above, expectations,” NASA said.

The fine phasing corrected alignment errors by using optical elements inside the James Webb Space Telescope’s NIRCam science instrument. The mission team gauged the performance by aligning and focusing the telescope on a star. The technology is very sensitive — as you can see above, Webb captured galaxies and stars in the background despite the very bright star in the middle.

NASA expects to finish aligning the observatory across all instruments by early May or sooner. After that, the team will spend two months prepping the instruments for capturing and sharing the first practical images and data in the summer.

The milestones show not just that Webb survived the 930,000-mile journey to its observation point, but that the telescope’s novel segmented mirror design works as promised — particularly important given the $10 billion price tag, numerous delays and Hubble’s mounting problems. For the most part, scientists can now concentrate on how they’ll use Webb to study the early universe and other elusive aspects of the cosmos.

Heliophysics pioneer Eugene Parker dies at 94

Dr. Eugene Parker, a pioneer in the field of heliophysics, has died at the age of 94. In the 1950s, Parker developed a theory that predicted solar winds. As NASA notes, Parker pushed the field forward throughout his career, “advancing ideas that addressed the fundamental questions about the workings of our Sun and stars throughout the universe.”

Heliophysics centers on the physics of the Sun and its impact on the Solar System. In 2018, NASA launched the Parker Solar Probe, the first spacecraft it named after a living person. The probe is tasked with observing the outer corona (or atmosphere) of the Sun to improve our understanding of solar winds and space weather. In December, it became the first spacecraft to enter the Sun’s upper atmosphere.

“Anyone who knew Dr. Parker, knew that he was a visionary. I was honored to stand with him at the launch of Parker Solar Probe and have loved getting to share with him all the exciting science results, seeing his face light up with every new image and data plot I showed him,” Nicola Fox, director of NASA’s heliophysics division, said. “I will sincerely miss his excitement and love for Parker Solar Probe. Even though Dr. Parker is no longer with us, his discoveries and legacy will live forever.”

‘SNL’ star Pete Davidson will be on Blue Origin’s next spaceflight

Blue Origin’s next crewed spaceflight is scheduled for March 23rd and, as reports suggested, Saturday Night Live star Pete Davidson will be one of the passengers. It will be New Shepard’s fourth flight with humans on board and its 20th overall.

The other passengers include SpaceKids Global founder Sharon Hagle and her husband, Marc Hagle, CEO of real estate developer Tricor International. Angel investor and former Party America CEO Marty Allen, University of North Carolina professor Jim Kitchen and Commercial Space Technologies president Dr. George Nield are also taking the trip.

All of Blue Origin’s previous crewed flights had a familiar face or two. Blue Origin and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and aviation pioneer Wally Funk were on the maiden trip last July. William Shatner took the record from Funk as the oldest person to reach space at 90 years old on the second flight. Good Morning America host Michael Strahan was on the third launch.