NASA astronauts will be going to the moon in a few years, if all goes according to plan.
In April of 2021, NASA picked the company to build the first crewed lunar lander, which will be used to put astronauts on the moon in the mid-2020s and establish a sustainable human presence on and around Earth.
NASA announced today that it plans to support the development of a second privately built crewed lunar lander.
NASA rolls Artemis 1 moon mission for the first time.
This strategy expedites progress toward a long-term, sustaining lander capability as early as the 2026 or 2027 timeframe, according to the program manager for the Human Landing System Program at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama.
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.
This new plan isn't new at all. NASA intended to use multiple private crewed landers for Artemis to have redundant in place and to drive the teams building the vehicles through competition. NASA went with SpaceX because Congress didn't allocate enough funding to support multiple vehicles.
The other two finalist for the award, Dynetics and Blue Origin, protested the decision. Blue Origin filed a lawsuit after Bezos wrote a letter to NASA Administrator Bill Nelson that criticized the decision.
There were more twists to come. The Senate Appropriations Committee directed NASA to choose a second company to develop a crewed moon lander. The funding increase attached to this order was quite small, but NASA now has assurances that the necessary money will come to support the second lander.
Nelson said during a news conference that Congress is committed to ensuring that we have more than one lander to choose from.
Nelson said they were expecting both Congress and the Biden administration to back them.
The White House will release its federal budget request next week.
Nelson said that they were doing a bit of a preview.
The second moon lander RFP will be released by the end of the month and a final RFP in the spring, according to agency officials. NASA will pick the builder of the new vehicle in early 2023 if all goes according to plan. The craft will be able to dock with Gateway, the small moon-orbiting space station that NASA plans to build, and take people and scientific gear from there to the surface.
The competition will only be open to American companies. NASA officials said during today's news conference that Musk's company will have the chance to negotiate the terms of its existing contract to perform additional lunar development work.
The first crewed moon touchdown since 1972 is expected to take place in the year or two following the landing of the Artemis 3 mission. The company will use a vehicle for the job. The uncrewed test flight to the lunar surface is expected in 2024. NASA officials said that the Artemis 3 plan is unaffected.
Gateway and private landers are not the only Artemis hardware. The program depends on a giant new NASA rocket called the Space Launch System.
The Artemis 1 mission that will be flown by the SLS and Orion was just rolled out to the launch pad at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Artemis 1 is expected to launch in May.
Mike Wall is the author of Out There, a book about the search for alien life. You can follow him on social media. Follow us on social media.
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