It turns out the space industry has a lot of ideas on how to improve NASA’s $11 billion, 15-year plan to collect and return samples from Mars.
Announced today, NASA has awarded $1.5 million contracts to seven companies to further develop their plans for the revamped Mars Sample Return mission.
According to the request for proposal, studies could be for complete overhauls of the mission design, or for designs that include elements of NASA’s MSR mission or NASA’s Artemis program.
NASA turned to private industry after finally admitting that its architecture for MSR is incredibly complicated.
Last year, an independent review board recommended that NASA revisit the mission design given the concerns about the technical features and the high costs.
The test version of the rocket is all Blue Origin hardware, but not all of it will necessarily end up going to space.
Tests are anticipated to take at least a week, Blue Origin CEO David Limp said on LinkedIn.
(The BE-4 engines gained flight heritage earlier this year, when they powered United Launch Alliance’s first Vulcan Centaur rocket launch.)
The 320-foot-tall launch vehicle is Blue Origin’s first heavy-lift rocket, designed to launch more than 45 tons of payload to low Earth orbit.
Blue Origin has also scored launches for telecom providers Telecast and Eutelsat for later this decade.
Blue Origin’s New Shepard is officially back in action, with the company today successfully launching the suborbital rocket for the first time in more than 15 months.
The rocket lifted off from Blue Origin’s launch site in West Texas at around 10:42 a.m. local time.
The mission successfully concluded after a period of 10 minutes, when the capsule safely returned to Earth after a brief suborbital flight.
This is the first time Blue Origin has launched New Shepard since September 2022, when an anomaly triggered an auto-abort mid-flight.
Blue flew New Shepard four times in 2022, including the failed launch.
Blue Origin is aiming to finally conclude a more than 15-month pause in operations of its New Shepard suborbital rocket, with the company announcing today that it will fly an uncrewed mission as early as December 18.
The company confirmed the launch on its social media account following a Bloomberg report of an internal email on the new targeted date.
The mission, called NS-24, will carry 33 science and research payloads and other cargo.
The Federal Aviation Administration formally concluded its investigation into the mishap in September, instructing Blue Origin to implement 21 corrective actions, including redesigning the engine and nozzle components as well as “organizational changes.”This new launch date means that Blue Origin has implemented all the actions and received its modified launch license from the FAA.
To date, the vehicle has flown more than 22 times, and has taken 31 people to the edge of space and back (including CEO Jeff Bezos himself).
The good news is that Blue Origin’s escape functionworked great and the nozzle problem was fixed. But this wasn’t the onlyissue the company had to deal with; it also found…
