Its Back To The Moon Time – Again
NASA Announces New Partnerships for Commercial Lunar Payload Delivery Services
“Nine U.S. companies now are eligible to bid on NASA delivery services to the lunar surface through Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) contracts, as one of the first steps toward long-term scientific study and human exploration of the Moon and eventually Mars. These companies will be able to bid on delivering science and technology payloads for NASA, including payload integration and operations, launching from Earth and landing on the surface of the Moon. NASA expects to be one of many customers that will use these commercial landing services.”
I’m encouraged at how many companies will be involved. I’m also happy to see that a lot of these are smaller companies who ought to be more nimble than a company who’s used to working on multi-billion dollar NASA contracts.
NASA Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program: What is the objective? I guess they want to help private companies to develop the expertise to land payloads on the moon, which is fine. If they just wanted to land payloads (tonnage) on the moon, they would have chosen SpaceX (they did bid), I think that is clear. I think SpaceX is truly “the elephant in the room”, with their development of their Starship, which should be able to land significant tonnage on the Lunar surface, as well as return and be re-uasable.
Where does the info that SpaceX bid on this come from?
It’s from a Reddit thread:
https://www.reddit.com/r/sp…
However, it seems now they are saying that SpaceX “expressed interest” but is not confirming they bid on this.
I guess I missed something, but what exactly does it mean that these companies—and only these companies—are ‘allowed’ to make bids for providing these services? Shouldn’t such down-selection take place during the bidding process? Why the sieving before the sieving?
I’m delighted that NASA is substantially pursuing commercial provision of these capabilities, but…why the multi-tiered screening even before the services are specified? Seems a bit…overly bureaucratic and inhibitory.
What, indeed, am I missing?
Two step selections are actually fairly common. I’m not sure about this case, but sometimes it streamlines the selection process (and allows more through reviews of a smaller number of proposals in step two.) Sometimes the selection criteria are different (this selection didn’t say which companies are offering orbiters, landers or both.) It could also be screening for companies using processes and with capabilities to qualify for consideration by NASA.
Since all the proposals are suppose to use domestic launchers. That means you can selected a Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, Antares, Atlas V (Vulcan Centaur later) or New Glenn for non-smallsat payloads to the Moon’s surface. All the other small launchers either current or coming online including the Electron can put about a hundred kilogram of payload on a lander at the most at 10’s of thousand of dollars per kilogram to LEO.
All the companies in the news article list stand in the shadows of the Men from Hawthorne and Kent. Who could up select themselves into this competition if they so chose. Especially the man from Kent, who could just buy out the service providers.
Yeah, they are kind of a pre-qualified pool of vendors. They still will have to bid on any work packages and they do say they may open up the pool at a later date. We had similar arrangements to fabricate research hardware and it greatly sped things up. I am a little dismayed that Relativity Space wasn’t selected
3D printing an entire lander is probably easier than printing an entire launch vehicle (a lander most likely will use pressure fed engines) and the Landers won’t be reusable (for a while anyway) I just hope this doesn’t become a mechanism to spread the largess around to pacify multiple vendors and nothing gets done.
In my world we do this all the time, but we call it “pre-qualification”. It’s done for a very simple reason: to make sure that I get only qualified bids from bidders who can actually do the work. This weeds out the companies that want to use a contract to leapfrog past current capabilities*; and it means that the mountains of paperwork that I have to review is only from folks actually able to do the work.
*This is not an entirely positive thing. I’ve been on the wrong side of the “able but no experience” wall several times in my career; and when I can I will give the small guy a shot. Still, I’m protecting clients here.
Last time they did this with “commercial Mars orbiter” tens of millions were burnt and absolutely nothing came of it. Even the final report was completely buried by NASA
https://www.nasa.gov/press-…
I’m pretty suspicious of this outcome. Looks like LockMart for the majority of the contract(s) plus a little bit money to spread around some small players for development contracts.
This selection doesn’t involve any money, just approval to bid for future contracts. But I can see how the LMA selection makes sense for NASA. The old, traditional approach to spacecraft development works. Perhaps slowly and expensively, but LMA knows how to do it and they have built planetary landers. The same can’t be said for some of the other, selected companies. So LMA would looks like an insurance policy, that at least one of the bids will be low risk.
I will believe it when it happens…….