NASA to support development of second Artemis lunar lander

NASA announced March 23 that it will support development of a second lander to transport astronauts to and from the lunar surface to provide competition with SpaceX for the later “sustainable” phase of the Artemis program. The agency said it will soon kick off a competition for what it calls Sustaining Lunar Development, which will back work on a second lander separate from the existing Human Landing System (HLS) award made to SpaceX in April 2021. The award will include both an uncrewed demonstration landing and a crewed landing, much like SpaceX’s HLS Option A contract. The Sustaining Lunar Development award is intended to ensure there are two companies that can compete for later services contracts for Artemis landing missions, providing the competition that many in Congress had lobbied NASA to provide after it made a single Option A award to SpaceX. “Today’s announcement is what I said to Congress. I promised competition, so here it is,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said during a call with reporters about the new program. One difference about the Sustaining Lunar Development effort is that the landers will have to be designed for greater performance than under the HLS competition, including the ability to transport more astronauts and cargo to the lunar surface and support longer stays. Agency officials, though, did not provide any specific changes in requirements.

NASA will select a second company to develop a crewed lunar lander alongside the existing Human Landing System award for SpaceX's Starship. Credit: SpaceX

SpaceX will not be eligible to compete for the Sustaining Lunar Development contract. However, NASA said it plans to exercise a provision in its HLS award, called Option B, to fund development of changes to SpaceX’s Starship lander to support the new requirements and a second crewed demonstration mission.

NASA officials said the decision to hold a second competition did not reflect a lack of confidence in SpaceX on its HLS development. “We’re still targeting 2025 for that landing. SpaceX continues to make good progress toward that mission,” said Jim Free, associate administrator for exploration systems development. “But beyond Artemis 3 we want to increase the healthy competition and advance our lunar capabilities to support more science, more exploration and an emerging lunar marketplace.”

Sustaining Lunar Development will be run as part of the overall HLS program, said Lisa Watson-Morgan, NASA’s HLS program manager. She said there will be “multiple swim lanes” within HLS for SpaceX’s current Option A work, new Option B work and the Sustaining Lunar Development project. The new award will be a fixed-price, milestone-based award like the original HLS award, and will have very similar requirements to Option B.

Watson-Morgan said NASA will release a draft request for proposals (RFP) for the new project by the end of March, with an industry day in early April. A final RFP will come out later in the spring, with the goal of making an award early next year.

Nelson declined to go into details about the budget for Sustaining Lunar Development. The White House is expected to release its fiscal year 2023 budget proposal as soon as March 28 that will include financial details for the effort.

NASA has struggled, though, to secure funding for HLS, receiving only about a fourth of the $3.4 billion it requested in fiscal year 2021. It did receive full funding, albeit at the much lower level of $1.195 billion, for fiscal year 2022. Efforts to secure several billion dollars of additional funding for a second lander through infrastructure and stimulus bills last year also failed.

A second lander could be significantly more expensive than the $2.9 billion cost of the HLS Option A award to SpaceX. In the original competition, a team led by Blue Origin bid $6 billion while a third proposal by Dynetics bid even more. Those were for the Option A landers that would be less capable, and presumably less expensive, that the ones that would meet the Sustaining Lunar Development requirements.

Free said he hoped that some technology development contracts awarded in September for risk reduction work will lower the cost of the Sustaining Lunar Development landers. “Many folks have told us, ‘We’ve learned a lot and we think our bids can be better this time,’” he said.

NASA to announce selection of company to fly VIPER rover to Moon

NASA will announce the commercial provider selected to deliver NASA's new water-hunting mobile robot, the Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER), to the South Pole of the Moon during a media teleconference at 2:30 p.m. EDT Wednesday, June 10.As the first resource-mapping mission on the surface of another world, VIPER will help pave the way for a new era of human missions to the lunar surface and will bring NASA a step closer to developing a sustainable, long-term robotic and human presence on the Moon as part of the Artemis program. Members of the media may request to join the teleconference by emailing their name, affiliation, and phone number to Alison Hawkes at alison.hawkes@nasa.gov or Rachel Kraft at rachel.h.kraft@nasa.gov by 12:30 p.m. June 10. VIPER's delivery to the Moon is part of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative, an innovative, service-based, competitive acquisition approach that enables rapid, affordable, and frequent access to the lunar surface via a growing market of American commercial providers. The selected company will be responsible for end-to-end services for delivery of VIPER, including integration with its lander, launch from Earth, and landing in a polar region on the Moon in late 2023 VIPER's delivery to the Moon is part of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative, which will leverage the capabilities of commercial industry to send scientific instruments and technology demonstrations to the Moon quickly.

The selected company will be responsible for end-to-end services for delivery of VIPER, including integration with its lander, launch from Earth, and landing in a polar region on the Moon in late 2023.

The teleconference audio will stream live here

NASA CubeSat Will Shine a Laser Light on the Moon's Darkest Craters

As astronauts explore the Moon during the Artemis program, they may need to make use of the resources that already exist on the lunar surface. Take water, for instance: Because it's a heavy and therefore expensive resource to launch from Earth, our future explorers might have to seek out ice to mine. Once excavated, it can be melted and purified for drinking and used for rocket fuel. But how much water is there on the Moon, and where might we find it? This is where NASA's Lunar Flashlight comes in. About the size of a briefcase, the small satellite - also known as a CubeSat - aims to detect naturally occurring surface ice believed to be at the bottom of craters on the Moon that have never seen sunlight. "Although we have a pretty good idea there's ice inside the coldest and darkest craters on the Moon, previous measurements have been a little bit ambiguous," said Barbara Cohen, principal investigator of the mission at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. "Scientifically, that's fine, but if we're planning on sending astronauts there to dig up the ice and drink it, we have to be sure it exists." Managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, the spacecraft is a technology demonstration: It will seek to achieve several technological firsts, including being the first mission to look for water ice using lasers. It will also be the first planetary spacecraft to use a "green" propellant, a new kind of fuel that is safer to transport and store than the commonly used spacecraft propellant hydrazine.

"A technology demonstration mission like Lunar Flashlight, which is lower cost and fills a specific gap in our knowledge, can help us better prepare for an extended NASA presence on the Moon as well as test key technologies that may be used in future missions," said John Baker, Lunar Flashlight project manager at JPL.

Peering Into the Shadows

Over the course of two months, Lunar Flashlight will swoop low over the Moon's South Pole to shine its lasers into permanently shadowed regions and probe for surface ice. Found near the North and South Poles, these dark craters are thought to be "cold traps" that accumulate molecules of different ices, including water ice. The molecules may have come from comet and asteroid material impacting the lunar surface and from solar wind interactions with the lunar soil.

"The Sun moves around the crater horizon but never actually shines into the crater," said Cohen, whose team includes scientists at the University of California, Los Angeles, John Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory and the University of Colorado. "Because these craters are so cold, these molecules never receive enough energy to escape, so they become trapped and accumulate over billions of years."

Lunar Flashlight's four-laser reflectometer will use near-infrared wavelengths that are readily absorbed by water to identify any accumulations of ice on the surface. Should the lasers hit bare rock as they shine into the South Pole's permanently shadowed regions, their light will reflect back to the spacecraft, signaling a lack of ice. But if the light is absorbed, it would mean these dark pockets do indeed contain ice. The greater the absorption, the more widespread ice may be at the surface.

While the CubeSat can provide information only about the presence of ice on the surface, and not below it, Lunar Flashlight seeks to fill a critical gap in our understanding of how much water ice these regions possess. "We will also be able to compare the Lunar Flashlight data with the great data that we already have from other Moon-orbiting missions to see if there are correlations in signatures of water ice, thereby giving us a global view of surface ice distribution," added Cohen.

The mission is detailed in a new paper published in the April 2020 issue of IEEE Aerospace and Electronic Systems Magazine.

Lunar Flashlight is funded by the Small Spacecraft Technology program within NASA's Space Technology Mission Directorate. The program is based at NASA's Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley. It will be one of 13 secondary payloads aboard the Artemis I mission, the first integrated flight test of NASA's Deep Space Exploration Systems, including the Orion spacecraft and Space Launch System (SLS) rocket launching from the newly upgraded Exploration Ground Systems at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

NASA opens call for Artemis lunar landers

NASA is seeking proposals for human lunar landing systems designed and developed by American companies for the Artemis program, which includes sending the first woman and next man to the surface of the Moon by 2024. The final call to industry comes after NASA issued two drafts on July 19 and Aug. 30, encouraging companies to send comments to help shape a key component of the agency's human exploration Artemis partnerships. NASA is expected to make multiple awards to industry to develop and demonstrate a human landing system. The first company to complete its lander will carry astronauts to the surface in 2024, and the second company will land in 2025. Proposals to build a landing system are due Nov. 1-an ambitious timeline consistent with the sequence of events leading to this point-however, companies have been preparing for, reviewing, and commenting on several drafts of NASA's broad agency announcement since mid-July and should be ready for this tight timeline. "In order to best accelerate our return to the Moon and prepare for Mars, we collaborated with industry on ideas to streamline the procurement process," said Marshall Smith, director of the Human Lunar Exploration Program at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "The private sector was eager to provide us feedback throughout this process, and we received more than 1,150 comments on the draft solicitations issued over the summer." Typical spaceflight hardware can take six to eight years to develop. With less than five years to land astronauts on the Moon, every word and requirement counts.

After reviewing the comments, NASA removed requirements that industry perceived as potential barriers to speed while preserving all the agency's human safety measures. For example, industry stated that delivery of a high number of formal technical reports would require a company to spend considerable resources and incur undue schedule risk.

Taking this into consideration, NASA has designed a less formal insight model that will be used for accessing critical contractor data while minimizing administrative overhead. As a result, NASA reduced the number of required contract deliverables from 116 to 37.

"Reports still are valuable and necessary, but to compromise and ease the bulk of the reporting burden on industry, we are asking for access to the companies' systems to monitor progress throughout development," said Nantel Suzuki, the Human Landing System program executive at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

"To maximize our chances of successfully returning to the Moon by 2024, we also are making NASA's engineering workforce available to contractors and asking proposers to submit a collaboration plan."

When called to accelerate its return to the Moon, NASA said it would meet this ambitious goal by "any means necessary."

The agency's preferred approach to a lunar landing is for the crew in the Orion spacecraft and the uncrewed human landing system to launch separately and meet in lunar orbit at the Gateway, which is critical to long-term exploration of the Moon. NASA wants to explore all options to achieve the 2024 mission and remains open to alternative, innovative approaches.

Another shift centered around how to best achieve sustainability on the Moon by 2028. In addition to greater performance, such as global lunar surface access and higher payload mass capacity, NASA originally required the Human Landing System to be refuelable as a means to ensure a more sustainable exploration architecture.

Multiple companies had concerns about this requirement, and NASA agreed to remove it so that industry has greater flexibility to address the more fundamental attribute of sustainability, which is long-term affordability.

"They were absolutely right," said Lisa Watson-Morgan, the Human Landing System program manager at NASA's Marshall Spaceflight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. "We are operating on a timeline that requires us to be flexible to encourage innovation and alternate approaches. We still welcome the option to refuel the landing system, but we removed it as a requirement."

NASA's Artemis program includes sending a suite of new science instruments and technology demonstrations to study the Moon, landing the first woman and next man on the lunar surface by 2024, and establishing a sustained presence by 2028. The agency will leverage its Artemis experience and technologies to prepare for the next giant leap - sending astronauts to Mars.

NASA Marshall to lead Artemis Program's human lunar lander development

NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine was joined Friday by U.S. Representatives Mo Brooks and Robert Aderholt of Alabama and Scott DesJarlais of Tennessee at the agency's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, to announce the center's new role leading the agency's Human Landing System Program for its return to the Moon by 2024. "Marshall Space Flight Center is the birthplace of America's space program. It was Marshall scientists and engineers who designed, built, tested, and helped launch the giant Saturn V rocket that carried astronauts on the Apollo missions to the Moon," Brooks said. "Marshall has unique capabilities and expertise not found at other NASA centers. I'm pleased NASA has chosen Marshall to spearhead a key component of America's return to the Moon and usher in the Artemis era. Thanks to Administrator Bridenstine for travelling here to share the great news in person." Bridenstine discussed the announcement in front of the 149-foot-tall Space Launch System (SLS) rocket liquid hydrogen tank structural test article currently being tested. "We greatly appreciate the support shown here today by our representatives in Congress for NASA's Artemis program and America's return to the Moon, where we will prepare for our greatest feat for humankind - putting astronauts on Mars," Bridenstine said. "We focus on a 'One NASA' integrated approach that uses the technical capabilities of many centers. Marshall has the right combination of expertise and experience to accomplish this critical piece of the mission." Informed by years of expertise in propulsion systems integration and technology development, engineers at Marshall will work with American companies to rapidly develop, integrate, and demonstrate a human lunar landing system that can launch to the Gateway, pick up astronauts and ferry them between the Gateway and the surface of the Moon.

"Marshall Space Flight Center, and North Alabama, have played a key role in every American human mission to space since the days of Mercury 7. I am proud that Marshall has been selected to be the lead for the landers program," said Aderholt. "I am also very proud that Marshall has designed and built the rocket system, the Space Launch System, which will make missions to the Moon and Mars possible. We look forward to working with our industry partners and our NASA partners from around the country."

NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, which manages major NASA human spaceflight programs including the Gateway, Orion, Commercial Crew and International Space Station, will oversee all aspects related to preparing the landers and astronauts to work together. Johnson also will manage all Artemis missions, beginning with Artemis 1, the first integrated test of NASA's deep space exploration systems.

The trip to Marshall came the day after Bridenstine visited NASA's Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans, where he viewed progress on the SLS core stage that will power NASA's Artemis 1 lunar mission. With the start of testing in June on the liquid hydrogen tank article, and the recent arrival of the liquid oxygen tank at Marshall, which manages the SLS Program, NASA is more than halfway through SLS structural testing.

"The Tennessee Valley, including Huntsville and stretching across Middle Tennessee, is a dynamic, exciting region, home to thousands of men and women - working at both public and private institutions - who are leading the United States into the next age of space exploration," said DesJarlais.

"As a member of the House Armed Services Committee, I am thrilled to visit one of our country's premier facilities, near Arnold Air Force Base and others, developing the latest spaceflight technology. NASA's Artemis program will help our country to create another American Century. We can be proud of our achievements, especially here at the Marshall Space Flight Center."

NASA recently issued a draft solicitation and requested comments from American companies interested in providing an integrated human landing system - a precursor to the final solicitation targeted for release in the coming months.

The agency's human lunar exploration plans are based on a two-phase approach: the first is focused on speed - landing on the Moon within five years, while the second will establish a sustained human presence on and around the Moon by 2028. The agency will use what we learn on the Moon to prepare for the next giant leap - sending astronauts to Mars.