NASA Asks Space Companies To Bid On Special Future Moon Mission Launch

In the latest evolution of its Artemis lunar efforts, NASA has announced that it wants its previously announced private space partners to bid on which will get to launch a future payload to the Moon. Assuming everything goes according to plan, NASA anticipates the winning company launching its new Moon payloads in 2022, a full two years ahead of the agency's deadline for returning humans to the Moon.

NASA has a total of 14 Commercial Lunar Payload Services partners, which are private space companies that the space agency can use for various missions. The big benefit of using private companies is that NASA can quickly launch its missions; rather than having to develop the technologies and systems itself, NASA can simply pay a private company that already has the technology ready to go.

This time around, NASA says it will pick a single CLPS partner to launch a total of 10 payloads to the Moon; overall, they weigh around 200lbs and include a variety of technology and science efforts. Using these investigations, NASA will learn more about the Moon, helping prepare for its future manned lunar missions and potential long-term habitation.

NASA detailed each of these payloads on Tuesday; they include things like the MAVEN, Lunar GNSS Receiver Experiment, RadPC, Regolith Adherence Characterization, and more. The missions will investigate things like how Moon dust sticks to different types of materials, heat flow from the Moon's interior, GPS-related technologies, an electric field that'll work as a 'dust shield,' and more.

NASA will announce the selected CLPS partner for this payload launch sometime later this year, the space agency said yesterday. This will be the sixth surface task award NASA will dish out under its Artemis program, which aims to return astronauts to the Moon by 2024. NASA says this planned launch in 2022 will play an important role in laying 'the foundation' for this eventual human mission.