Keith’s note: This hearing starts Tuesday morning at 10:00 am EDT House Space & Aeronautics Subcommittee Hearing – Leveraging Commercial Innovation for Lunar Exploration: A Review of NASA’s CLPS Initiative and will be webcast live.

Keith’s note: According to NASA “Carrying science and tech on Firefly Aerospace’s first CLPS or Commercial Lunar Payload Services flight for NASA, Blue Ghost Mission 1 launched at 1:11 a.m. EST aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Launch Complex 39A at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The company is targeting a lunar landing on Sunday, March 2.”

“Our review found that NASA deviated from its original, hands-off strategy for the initiative and from its plan for incremental progress towards larger missions. Rather, the Agency’s aggressive lander development schedules led to increasingly risk-averse practices and policies. For example, NASA insight and oversight increased, and more detailed vendor proposals were required. This resulted in higher costs and delayed delivery schedules while threatening the initiative’s ability to achieve its broad objectives. Specifically, inserting a larger lander to accommodate the Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) into CLPS’s early schedule interfered with a progressive development approach. This introduced the added risk of beginning the first large lander delivery before knowledge could be gained from the success (or failure) of smaller deliveries. NASA’s planned hands-off approach was also somewhat negated when the Agency added augmented insight and placed added requirements on the vendors’ development process. We found that NASA-directed changes, including augmented insight and landing site changes, led to $171.4 million in project cost increases. … Our analysis showed these challenges will continue to hinder NASA’s ability to meet the initiative’s objectives. While the initiative has a contract capped at $2.6 billion through 2028, increased costs on previous task orders jeopardize the plan to issue two task orders per year. … In the 5 years since CLPS began, NASA has not reassessed market conditions to better understand the Agency’s role and changing market conditions. Finally, we found CLPS lacks a detailed management plan that could outline a disciplined approach, promote accountability for how the Agency measures success, and help the initiative weigh competing priorities.” Full report

Keith’s note: The first launch of a ULA Vulcan rocket – powered by Blue Origin and Northrop Grumman engines – took off this morning at 2:18 a.m. EST and has sent the Astrobotic Pergegrine lander on its way to the Moon. Alas it is having communications and power issues which they managed to fix that but there there are critical propulsion system issues. I am going to be on Deutsche Welle TV just after 12:00 pm EST Update: [Deutsche Welle Audio] – and then on Alhurra TV around 2:45 pm EST Update: [Alhurra audio] – then BBC World News TV at 3:45 pm EST and then Deutsche Welle TV (again) just after 6:00 pm today Update: [second Deutsche Welle Audio] to talk about the mission and the various things on board the Peregrine lander. More from NASA

Space Resources are the Key to Safe and Sustainable Lunar Exploration “Today, we’re taking a critical step forward by releasing a solicitation for commercial companies to provide proposals for the collection of space resources. When considering such proposals, we will require that all actions be taken in a transparent fashion, in full compliance with the Registration Convention, Article II and other provisions of the Outer Space Treaty, and all of […]

NASA RFI: Payloads and Research Investigations on the Surface of the Moon released “NASA is soliciting input to assist the Deputy Associate Administrator for Exploration in the Science Mission Directorate in planning the development of investigations on the lunar surface to be delivered by the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program.” HeroX Helps NASA Advance Moon Exploration with Miniaturized Payload Design Competition “HeroX, the leading crowdsourcing platform that solves global […]

Sources report to @NASAWatch that #NASA sent a notice out late Friday night pulling the current CLPS 19C Task Order. No reason was given. Stay tuned. #Artemis #Moon2024 pic.twitter.com/y9YUgDErmD — NASA Watch (@NASAWatch) February 1, 2020 Update: basic reason why @NASA pulled CLPS 19C Task Order regards language that's circulating in Congress & whether #NASA task order wording was totally compliant with that language. Once that has been checked it […]