Intuitive Machines and NASA say they are in the final stages of preparations for the launch of that company’s first lunar lander mission, but exactly when the spacecraft will lift off remains unclear.

Not too surprising, but the schedule slip is now official. Artemis II is NET 2025-09 and Artemis III is NET 2026-09.

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/12123157

Key info:

The success of Ingenuity has also affected NASA’s plans for Mars Sample Return (MSR). The agency, in cooperation with the European Space Agency, announced in July 2022 that it will include two helicopters based on Ingenuity on a future lander that will take the samples collected by Perseverance and launch them into orbit. Those helicopters will be a backup if Perseverance itself is not able to deliver samples to the lander by transporting samples from a surface cache to the lander.

I'm super impressed with Ingenuity, and can't wait for more Martian helicopters! The Dragonfly mission to Titan also sounds awesome.

In a procurement notice posted Dec. 5, NASA announced it would allow companies the choice of using either firm fixed price or cost plus incentive fee contract structures for both the design and the production of the U.S. Deorbit Vehicle (USDV).

When NASA issued the original request for proposals (RFP) for the vehicle in September, the agency gave bidders a choice. They could propose to develop the vehicle using a cost-plus contract and then produce it under a fixed-price contract, a so-called “hybrid” approach. Alternatively, they could propose doing both development and production under fixed-price contracts.

The revised approach now adds an option to perform both the development and the production under cost-plus contracts. NASA, in both the procurement notice and a blog post, did not disclose the reason for the change.

NASA has also revised the deadline for submitting proposals. The agency originally requested proposals to be submitted by Nov. 17, with a single award expected in April 2024. NASA later extended the proposal deadline to Dec. 14. With this change, NASA has pushed back the deadline to Feb. 12, with an award expected in late May or early June.

NASA flew last November the Low-Earth Orbit Flight Test of an Inflatable Decelerator (LOFTID) as a secondary payload on the Atlas 5 launch of the JPSS-2 weather satellite. LOFTID deployed an inflatable heat shield six meters across that survived reentry and splashed down in the Pacific Ocean.

Before the flight United Launch Alliance showed an interest in the technology as part of its Sensible Modular Autonomous Return Technology (SMART) concept for recovering the booster engine section of its Vulcan rocket, and helped support the LOFTID flight opportunity. ULA is now working with NASA through a Space Act Agreement on advancing the LOFTID technology.

The partnership with ULA would involve an aeroshell 10 meters across. “We’re currently working with them now designing that,” said Joe Del Corso, project manager for LOFTID at the Langley Research Center, during a Nov. 30 meeting of the NASA Advisory Council’s technology committee. That includes an upcoming preliminary design review of the larger aeroshell.

ULA is not the only company that has approached NASA about the LOFTID technology. “These folks are coming to the table going, ‘Hey, we have an application. We see that it’s been used. You’ve validated the technology,’” he said.

Among them is Outpost, a startup proposing commercial reentry systems that would use inflatable systems like those on LOFTID. “We’re not sure whether they’re going to go forward,” Del Corso said of Outpost. “They’re a smaller company that can’t necessarily afford NASA’s current way of doing business.”

NASA is also working with other companies that he declined to identify other than they are “bigger names” in the industry. Those companies, he said, are looking at even larger aeroshells 18 to 20 meters across for applications he did not disclose.

As Boeing nears completing final assembly of NASA’s second Space Launch System (SLS) core stage at the Michoud Assembly Facility (MAF) in New Orleans, the space agency’s prime contractor for SLS stages is continuing production of hardware for the next two units. The core stage for Artemis II is the last one that will be completed at MAF, with future builds now planned to undergo final construction at their launch site, the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida.

The first core stage to be completed at KSC will be the unit for Artemis III; Boeing has already transported the engine section to Florida to complete its outfitting and is hoping to have its new facilities in the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) ready by the end of 2024 — the same time as it intends the stage hardware for that launch to be ready for final assembly. Structures for the Artemis IV core stage are also in production, with delivery of the engine section structure to Florida expected in the first part of next year.

Artemis III core stage will debut new final assembly methods

The core stage for Artemis II is in its final integrated testing ahead of completion in the next several weeks, and while that is the focus of Boeing’s production work at MAF, NASA is still pressing towards a scheduled launch of the next mission – Artemis III – only a year after the target date for Artemis II at the end of 2024. Work on the third core stage is aiming towards completion in 2025, with the final phase of production moving from MAF in New Orleans to facilities at KSC.