NASA announces plans to develop second Moon lander, alongside SpaceX’s Starship

NASA announces plans to develop second Moon lander, alongside SpaceX’s Starship

Today, NASA announced plans to develop a second human lunar lander for its Artemis program, the agency’s major spaceflight initiative to send humans back to the Moon. To build the vehicle, the space agency is calling on commercial space companies to propose concepts for landers that can take people to and from the Moon’s orbit and the lunar surface, with the goal of having them ready by 2026 or 2027 at the earliest.

As part of Artemis, NASA’s program to send astronauts back to the moon, the agency in 2019 looked to hire two companies to provide the landers to take its astronauts from lunar orbit to the surface of the moon. But with insufficient financing from Congress, the agency decided in April last year to give just one contract, to SpaceX.

Other companies would have the opportunity to compete for future missions, NASA officials said.

On Wednesday, Bill Nelson, the NASA administrator, said the space agency would soon announce a competition to develop a second lunar lander.

“I promised competition,” Mr. Nelson said, “so here it is.”

The second company would share NASA’s moon missions — about once a year over the course of a decade or so — with SpaceX. “These are not isolated missions,” Mr. Nelson said. “Each is going to build on the past progress.”

NASA’s announcement Wednesday marks a major expansion for the Artemis program, the agency’s ambitious series of planned missions to return humans to the moon for the first time since the Apollo days.

It’s also something of an about-face. The agency came under fire from both private industry and Congress after it awarded a single $2.89 billion contract for a landing system to SpaceX last April, with Blue Origin going so far as to sue NASA in federal court. (This was after the company and defense contractor Dynetics filed an objection — which was subsequently dismissed — with a government accountability watchdog.) But this time around, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said the agency was all about fostering competition.

“We think, and so does the Congress, that competition leads to better, more reliable outcomes and benefits everybody,” he said. “It benefits NASA, [it] benefits the American people. It is obvious, the benefits of competition.”

In April 2021, NASA selected SpaceX as its partner to land the next American astronauts on the lunar surface. That demonstration mission is targeted no earlier than April 2025. Exercising an option under the original award, NASA now is asking SpaceX to transform the company’s proposed human landing system into a spacecraft that meets the agency’s requirements for recurring services for a second demonstration mission. Pursuing more development work under the original contract maximizes NASA’s investment and partnership with SpaceX.

To bring a second entrant to market for the development of a lunar lander in parallel with SpaceX, NASA will issue a draft solicitation in the coming weeks. This upcoming activity will lay out requirements for future development and demonstration of lunar landing capability to take astronauts between orbit and the surface of the Moon. This effort is meant to maximize NASA’s support for competition and provides redundancy in services to help ensure NASA’s ability to transport astronauts to the lunar surface. 

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