NASA Finally Adds Space X, Blue Origin to the CLPS

Staff Reporter, Tech Times 20 November 2019, 11:11 am

With the retirement of the Space Shuttle program in 2011, NASA has been without its own reusable spacecraft system. Manned missions and personnel exchange and transfer towards the International Space Station (ISS) were primarily done with cooperation from the Russian Space Agency ROSCOSMOS on their Soyuz Spacecraft. Sending cargo to the ISS was mainly done through either 3rd party companies such as SpaceX and Northrop Grumman or through partner countries Japan or Russia.

With Project Artemis, NASA plans to finally revisit the Lunar Surface, nearly 30 years after the last manned mission to the moon. Alongside Project Artemis, NASA has also launched the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS), an additional program that contracts 3rd party companies to deliver non-personnel packages, robotics, and other scientific payloads. These contracts are of an indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity, which means that NASA can request as many launches and cargo as it realistically can from the contracted companies during the contracted length of time. It, however, doesn't mean that each company is guaranteed a fixed number of launches.

Adding new members to the CLPS

NASA recently announced that five new companies are joining the CLPS. The notable ones, Blue Origin, which is owned by Amazon mogul Jeff Bezos, and SpaceX, owned by Tesla founder Elon Musk, are already capable of sending large payloads into orbit with their reusable rockets and boosters. Sierra Nevada Corporation is another notable company that has previously worked with Virgin Galactic for the design of RocketMotorTwo for the British company's SpaceShipTwo. Tyvak Nano-Satellite Systems is known for providing governments and commercial customers nanosatellite services, from designing to launching. Ceres Robotics is the youngest company to be accepted, which was formed by former NASA employees in 2018.

Nine companies are already part of the CLPS program. Lockheed Martin, Moon Express, Masten Space Systems, Astrobotic, Draper, Deep Space Systems, Firefly Aerospace, Intuitive Machines, and Orbit Beyond are all part of the first batch of companies under the CLPS program. These nine companies all have lander designs that are currently under development. The five new additions to the CLPS programs all promise to be able to send larger payloads to the Moon than the original nine companies.

A Mission Back to the Moon

The recent and rapid development of NASA's space program was spurred by a challenge from Vice President Mike Pence. Blue Origin announced the design of its Blue Moon lander back in May. SpaceX has its Starship spacecraft design recently revealed as well, with prototypes currently in development and in texting. Other companies, such as Ceres Robotics and Sierra Nevada Corporation, are aiming to have their own landers ready by 2022 to 2023.

However, all of these landers are focused on cargo as of the time being. NASA is still searching for a lander design that will take humans back to the surface of the moon.