NASA to Release Draft RFP for Second Human Lunar Lander
by Douglas Messier
Managing Editor
NASA plans to release a draft request for proposal (RFP) by the end of the month for a second crewed lunar lander to join the Human Landing System (HLS) being developed by SpaceX, officials announced during a media conference on Wednesday.
“Competition is the key to our success,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in describing the Sustaining Lunar Development contract.
NASA Associate Administrator for Exploration Systems Development Jim Free said the space agency will award a fixed-price, milestones-based contract for the development of a second lander as well as uncrewed and crewed demonstration missions of the vehicle to and from the lunar surface.
Lisa Watson-Morgan, Human Landing System Program manager, said that industry days to obtain feedback on the draft RFP will be held in early April. A final RFP will be issued later this spring, she added.
Free said the competition will be open to every company except for SpaceX. NASA has awarded SpaceX a $2.9 billion contract to develop HLS and conduct uncrewed and crewed demonstration missions. The space agency will exercise an option in SpaceX’s contract to provide the company funding to develop a lander to meet the specifications laid out in the new RFP, Free said. SpaceX will conduct a crewed demonstration mission of the new vehicle.
Watson-Morgan said SpaceX has met all of its milestones thus far on the HLS contract, and that the work is “going very, very well.”
NASA will launch the Artemis I mission – the first flight of the giant Space Launch System (SLS) and an uncrewed Orion spacecraft – on a mission to the moon within the next few months. The rocket was rolled out to the launch pad for the first time last week.
The Artemis II mission will send astronauts to orbit the moon in 2024. Artemis III will involve a crewed landing at the moon’s south pole using SpaceX’s HLS. That mission is planned for no earlier than 2025.
NASA originally planned to award contracts for two companies to build separate human landers. When the space agency received only one quarter of the requested funding from Congress for the program, NASA awarded a single contract to SpaceX.
Key members of Congress were unhappy with the decision. Losing bidders Blue Origin and Dynetics unsuccessfully protested the award.
Nelson said he was confident that Congress would approve funding required for the second lander. The Biden Administration will release its federal budget request for fiscal year 2023 next week.
Nelson was asked about operations of the International Space Station (ISS) in light of tensions between the United States and Russia over the latter’s invasion of Ukraine. The NASA administrator said professional relationships between the astronauts and cosmonauts in orbit and space agency and Roscosmos personnel on the ground remain unaltered.
Nelson said he was encouraged by the launch of three Russian cosmonauts to the ISS last week. He also expects NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei and two cosmonauts to return aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft next week as planned. Russian and American ground personnel who will assist in recovery operations are being put in place, he added.
66 responses to “NASA to Release Draft RFP for Second Human Lunar Lander”
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https://uploads.disquscdn.c… Another chance for ALPACA?
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Given its mass issues the first time around and the fact that the requirements are a lot higher for this new round, them and Blue’s bid need a lot of rework to hit the targets. Not saying it’s impossible but I hope they used the time since the award to significantly revise their proposal and pricing.
It would be the perfect companion with BFR/SpaceX lander; taking advantage of the massive landing capability and doing excursions and/or preparation for the SpaceX landing sites.
Or the BFR for carrying its refuelling pods in LEO between hops.
But it seems unlikely given that they are partnered with ULA and SpaceX has a big head start.
Given the extended timeline for the option B, Vulcan Tricore with ACES could make it possible. But I fear ULA will refuse to fund it themselves. which would slow it down too much even if Dynetics was willing to use it.
I put the odds of ever seeing Vulcan tri core at close to zero unless SLS fails massively on first flight and forces a pivot to other rides, of which I’m sure Vulcan would get included in just via lobbying. You are right, the parents won’t fund it, they haven’t even funded ACES. And I don’t think Dynetics can afford to pay for it either.
thats pretty reasonable. If SLS fails on its first flight…well the game is totally different.
it would surprise me enormously if it does. like Webb they have spent the money to retire the risk
the only reason for a Tri core Vulcan is if the DoD needs it. I dont see that
I generally agree.
Also, if there are going to be NSSL 3 development awards, then they are coming up next year. And other then this and ACES I do not see ULA proposing anything else. And they will need to do something to keep up with the competition, especially as they are not even flying the vehicle they promised under the old contract.
I don’t think NSSL 3 is likely to include any development awards. Thus, I think ACES will continue to be strictly aspirational. All the vehicles likely to compete will either have completed development or have completed the majority of it by the time choices are made and contracts awarded. I don’t think the “only two providers” rule from NSSL 2 will survive either.
PS: Also Lockheed claims to be bullish on space, and they hinted that they may enter the MADV design as their Lunar lander
https://twitter.com/LMSpace…
And if Boeing wants to enter their design again, they too are going to need a vehicle.
NASA was quite vague yesterday but it seems like they do not have a spare SLS for flying the Lunar Lander B Demo.
So they ULA is going to need a better rocket.
I’m curious what they expect to lift the MADV though, SLS or Starship or Falcon Heavy expendable are about the only things that can get it to orbit unless it’s lifted mostly empty and then fuel on orbit with a series of tankers. 62 tons fully fueled with a 22 ton dry mass. It’s a cool design, certainly a better one than Blue or Dynetics entry. Basically a baby Starship in a way.
I haven’t read up on it yet, but it looks a bit like the Mars lander they proposed some time ago. (Constellation era?)
It would explain why the lunar lander has 4 wings on its tail.
If I were the planner, I would go Falcon Heavy for starters.
SLS is very likely to be a problem vehicle as throwing money at a problem cannot make up for lack of testing or for taking so long that time caused problems crop up. Supporting engineering jobs is not the same thing as supporting engineering quality. Too many cooks etc. Time caused problems are possible as excessive waiting time is similar to the problems with a car that is run monthly instead of daily.
Starship is still a wild card. Due to the testing culture it has a much higher chance of success than SLS, but there are still many possibilities for problems. For early operations, I think Superheavy recovery with expendable Starship could operate well before Starship recovery and reflight becomes routine. If there are delays trying to get reusable Starship, it may not be a good option for planning right now. If wrong I’ll take my crow barbequed.
Falcon Heavy is a known quality at this time.
Hrm…
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How about something like the Hercules Reusable Space Vehicle? A methalox propellant, 90 MT mass, spacecraft using composite construction?
Rocket Labs is already working on something similar with their Neutron rocket, and ESA already has an expander-cycle methalox rocket engine of appropriate thrust with their M-10.
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Could a foreign company bid? Like MHI of Japan? Or Arianespace of France? Probably not?
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They talked explicitly about American companies. Perhaps if they had a subdivision or partnership in the USA that would do the production, but it would probably be difficult.
They could probably pursue that via JAXA or ESA initiatives.
No company in Japan could build a lander. The EU could build a cargo lander based on the European service module (Germany), but they have no foundation to build a crew cabin/ascent module on.
Gee, it’s like you’ve never heard of the JAXA HTV?
https://www.youtube.com/wat…
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That’s a module docked to a station, not a lander. I like the porch on it, how they can put experiments out there.
No, that’s a JAXA cargo spacecraft berthed to the International Space Station. The HTV has a pressurized section for cargo and an unpressurized section for cargo. Just like the European ATV did.
Japan kept up cargo flights to the ISS, years after Europe stopped their own ATV cargo spacecraft. The newest iteration of the JAXA cargo spacecraft is due to deliver more cargo to the ISS this year.
So tell me again how Europe could make a manned lunar lander, but Japan couldn’t.
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Oh, I stand corrected. But I didn’t say Europe could make a human lander, just that they’ve proposed a cargo lander based on the European power module. Also, Japan couldn’t make a human lander. They’re just launching to leo and docking with iss (no humans on board).
One of the reasons I loathe the cult is because they’ve normalized downplaying hls difficulty. Its a big deal. What else could you build that would be soPowerPoint. What else compares? I mean, the Apollo LM, yes?
Anyway, back when Trump restarted this I was with the eelv camp.. That would have required canning Orion because of weight and sls because why bother, but that’s what my favorite people were saying and I made sense.
We’re not so different; I just don’t care for the cult and think starship sucks. But I’m not an sls fanatic. It’s just done and ready, so get lockmart, blue and dynetics to build a lander.
I like gateway/dst. Have since I first saw the powerpoint.
How long will the FAA c0ck-block NASA?
The FAA says:
So, maybe we’ll hear something Monday.
The FAA has been trying to cut a deal with Fish and Wildlife and National Parks, both of which apparently have something akin to statutory veto powers. I would not be surprised if they have also been shopping this around to gin up a national security angle.
the FAA is not blocking NASA. it is blocking SpaceX from circumventing the law and trying to take care of the national interest
Which is why they’re letting SpaceX write the PEA, right?
SpaceX is also building a new launch tower for Starship at LC 39a, and a new factory at a site on Roberts road Southwest of VAB. Probably 6-9 months to completion and the EA for this one is in hand.
I’ll be curious to see when they start transferring launch vehicles to test to the Cape.
I guess you missed the word “factory” in Terry’s comment.
Blocking SpaceX is blocking NASA. It’s called the transitive property.
no its not.
yes it is
SpaceX isn’t circumventing the law. Doing things you don’t personally approve of is not illegal. Delaying SpaceX at Starbase is not in the national interest.
fish and wildlife probably disagrees with you. they (spaceX) understated what they were going to use the site for. that required more study.
its not unique. in the stim bill there is money for completely rebuilding the airport on my property that is leased out to the US Navy. the TANG wanted to change the site that had been used for their helicopter ops and the USN wanted a new runway which I suspect is for F35’s. as a dispersal strip. they are doing a second assessment. and we are not maintaining any permanent fuel there.
At least until the end of April. According the most recent news!
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GSE is the hold up.
Building on a dirt pile does that.
No reporters asked if contestants could launch (or partner to launch) on Falcon Heavy.
Then again, none asked if NASA expected new companies to bid other then those already under appendix N
I was not expecting this — SpaceX getting a free trip through the second round. Senator Ballast has surprised me. What will the NASA congressional pork caucus do with this, I wonder. Presumably, they were tipped off in advance.
“First rule in government spending: Why build one when you can have two, twice the price”
S. R. Hadden (Contact movie)
It is not really exact in this case. The second equipment will probably be more expensive than the first one.
It could be that they think the first will fail, that they need another system in the pipe (that looks more like what worked once already).
Ballast Bill does not believe a lunar landing will happen in this decade in my viewpoint
Why would he believe that?
Barring nuclear war or other devastation (not impossible, unfortunately), we can do it in 8 years. I mean, it’s not guaranteed, but it’s doable and there’s funding and momentum
maybe 8 but I dont think that there is the funding. anyway lets see. the world will be a very different place a year from now. history is moving quickly now 🙂
The world will be a very different place a year from now. The portents suggest it will be a considerably better place in most respects.
It’ll happen a lot sooner than eight years hence. Try three.
They must already be planning to run the gateway program with no lander. Artemis 3 will come long before any lander is ready. They’ll need to justify doing flights to the Moon with Han work only in NHRO.
that is exactly what they are planning on doing…
there are three outcomes of the first flight. massive success, massive failure and then something in between and IF I were a betting man I would tell you that the “in between” thing is likely the Orion. that will determine how quickly they can fly 2…or if they need another uncrewed flight…but in any event 3 will come, as you say along well before there is a lander. and I suspect well before there is a gateway. but I bet 3 will morph into a gateway assembly flight
Under the most recent revision of Project Artemis, no lunar landing is scheduled for the Artemis-4 mission. The only destination is Gateway. Artemis-4 co-launches a manned Orion plus the extra ESA habitation module for Gateway.
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Yes. I’m saying that they’ll have to change the Artemis 3 mission to no lander, then eventually chang the entire program to have no lander ever.
The commercial contract approach won’t work. It’ll just burn money until some milestone deadline is extended, extended again, more and more money dumped in, then cancellation.
The parts that will work: SLS, Orion and Gateway. A bunch of companies will grift the lander money, but they’ll never fly humans on one.
The delays with Project Artemis are primarily because of SLS. The Orion was ready for its test flight 3 years ago.
NASA can’t help that Congress slashed the HLS budget by 75%. Even so, one of the HLS variants will probably be ready for the Artemis 3 mission before the SLS ever will! Because Boeing is that messed up.
So far all the NASA commercial contract fixed-price programs are having marvelous success, with the exception of the Boeing Starliner. But even Starliner, even as delayed as it is, even though it is 2.5 times more expensive than Dragon, Starliner is still faster and cheaper than the cost-plus single-source Orion program.
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Orion was not ready 3 yrs ago; the service module was still being built in Germany.
SLS is at the pad for WDR and will fly by June. Future production is on track.
The lander is a product of a cult that I don’t understand. A real, cult-free lander program would take ten years and swallow 15 billion.
There would have to be huge changes in management to build a lander. Commercial milestone contracts won’t work, they’ll just attract snake oil men.
Orion was not ready 3 yrs ago; the service module was still being built in Germany.
Wrong. The ESM arrived in November 2018. A year later than ESM was supposed to, but still years ahead of the availability of the disastrous SLS.
https://www.nasa.gov/press-…
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Wow, time flies; I’m off by a few months. Still, it’s not like they were ready to fly when it got to KSC. They had to integrate it and there was the whole virus thing.
I bet Starship never makes orbit, but if it does, it’ll take just as long as sls took. A cult can’t change the laws of physics or advance the state of the art.
The “cult” has already advanced the state of the art. And it has done so without any resort to changing the laws of physics. More advances – all well within the laws of physics – continue to be made.
Hi Gary. Back with yet another “secret identity” are you?
The only “cult” in evidence seems to be the cult of OldSpace of which you are high priest. Apparently your deity – like that of Scientology – also requires major ritual sacrifices of cash.
You’re likely correct that this new Sustaining Lunar Development program will not actually result in any new lander being made available. But the existing, and in-process, lander contract with SpaceX will definitely produce one. I’m curious as to why you categorically rule that out.
SLS, Orion and Gateway may well “work” in the narrow sense of meeting their performance specifications – though even that cannot be casually assumed. But none of them will get anyone all the way to the Moon. For that, a lander is required. Even with a lander, though, SLS, Orion and Gateway are too limited and will fly too infrequently to support any kind of consequential human presence on the Moon. For that, Starships – both Earth EDL-capable types as well as depot ships and landers – will be required.
I have no confidence in starship because the engine and weight. To me it’s a Mars concept left over from efforts to appeal to “journey to Mars” during the Obama administration. It was just recycled and thrown in to the new Moon program, picked up by a woman between administrators, her then being removed from a position to make awards like that in the future.
I would expect flight rates to the Moon to be infrequent given the difficulty involved. Is there anything as difficult as building a machine to take people down to the surface?
Anyway, my take on Gateway is that it is a precursor to a real ship that could go to Mars, or perhaps another step towards that goal. Deep Space Transport I think they call it.
They want to e outside the magnetosphere doing work, flying these things from one orbit to another. It’s slow flight rate reflects the difficulty.
Any specifics on the alleged engine and weight “problems” for Starship? With maximum propellant loads on both stages, the Starship stack has a thrust to weight ratio at liftoff of 1.4. SLS’s ratio is 1.47. No critical difference there. The Starship stack is about twice as heavy as the SLS stack and its booster stage produces about twice the liftoff thrust.
Starship’s original conception was as a Mars transport, but that hardly renders variations of it unsuitable as Moon ships.
Kathy Lueders’s decision to award the HLS contract to SpaceX and Starship was the correct call. That the new regime has subsequently demoted her for failing to feed more money to legacy contractors reflects no discredit on her but on the swamp of festering corruption that is the Biden regime.
Flights to the Moon need not remain infrequent if their current difficulty and expense are engineered out. That is what Starship is designed to do.
Anent the comparative difficulty of landing on various celestial bodies, the Moon is not especially difficult. Landing on both Earth and Mars are harder as there are atmospheres to contend with.
Gateway is not a prototype of any sort of manned interplanetary ship. It would have to be many times its currently planned size to take on such a task and would still be poorly designed for the job. It could not land on, then later take off from, the Martian surface, for example.
That would be the Mars Basecamp Lander. Quite a looker at least.
The HLS Starship lander will be ready before Artemis 3’s current NET date in 2025. Whether SLS and Orion will also be ready by then is still very much TBD. The one thing that will not be ready by then is Gateway. For Artemis 3 to be a Gateway-involved mission, either Gateway must be speeded up or Artemis 3 delayed until Gateway is a thing. I think if Artemis 3 looks to be slipping into 2026 or later because of some combination of SLS, Orion or Gateway delays, SpaceX will offer to do an all-SpaceX lunar mission that can be called Artemis 3 with the NASA Artemis 3 crew and several others – one of whom is likely to be Jared Isaacman – launching aboard a Dear Moon-class Starship and meeting up with an HLS Starship lander in lunar orbit.
If NASA thought that, it wouldn’t have chosen the SpaceX design in the first place. The National Team turned in a “Big LM”-type lander design and didn’t get picked.
This “new” program isn’t about engineering or even about redundancy, it’s about pork. The Congressional patrons of OldSpace are fine with their guys getting sole-source contracts, but not with newcomers like SpaceX, who don’t play the usual game, getting such a deal instead.
I look at civilian spaceflight as a sort of gun buyback program for the federal government contractors. By that I mean: of you give Lockheed M. Billions to build an ascent state for a LM, all those people will get to work on that instead some new ICBM program.
Now, that might sound like childish thinking, but it is true that people doing that kind of work live very good lives and can drop dead feeling like they did good things. So when all of this stuff is called a jobs program, we’ll, what’s wrong with that?
This whole starship thing got going in earnest when Raptor was canned by the airforce in favor of be4. SpaceX does DOD work (Raptor go 1 or 2 billion in DOD development cash), even launching military payloads built by the corporations everyone thinks that SpaceX is competing with.
The blue origin lander would work. Starship isn’t going to work. That’s all I’m saying, perhaps adding that the fan cult is missing that SpaceX does all the same stuff that legacy corporations do, they just haven’t been around as long.
An eccentric view of civilian spaceflight. But it is true that, until recently, it had been 40 years since the last ICBM program was ginned up.
FDR’s jobs programs in the 1930s resulted in the construction of much useful infrastructure, most of which is still in use. Current “jobs programs,” such as SLS and Orion have turned out to be, yield nothing that can be used without large and continuing additional expenses. They are nearly as wasteful, economically, as would be a program that paid people to break windows and also paid other people to fix them.
Raptor and BE-4 were never competitors in any USAF program. SpaceX was a competitor of ULA in the NSSL Phase 2 competition during which ULA chose the BE-4 over AJR’s AR-1 as the engine for Vulcan. SpaceX was the other winner of that competition, but Starship and Raptor, which were initially offered, had been ruled out by USAF as too speculative – a decision that now looks fairly amusing in retrospect, but was less so at the time.
The only development money Raptor ever got via USAF was for a study of using its sub-scale version in a notional alternate and more powerful upper stage for Falcon Heavy. The sum received was $33 million, not $1 or $2 billion.
Capt. Oler was of the opinion the notional FH upper stage might have been intended for launch of a larger version of X-37B that could optionally carry crew as well as experimental payloads. This seemed a shrewd surmise at the time, but nothing has come of it since. Raptor went on to full-size implementation and Starship work began in earnest. Perhaps USAF decided that Starship, done by SpaceX on its own, was likely to be available as soon or sooner than could any X-37C built by Boeing via standard procurement and contracting practices.
The National Team lander might well have worked – at twice the cost and a fraction of the capability of Starship and with most of it initially expendable. Starship will work better, sooner and less expensively with no throw-away parts from the get-go. Your conviction to the contrary looks to be a classic faith-based opinion.
So, also, your opinion that SpaceX is just like legacy corporations, merely newer. No, it is not – something readily observable by even casual perusal. SpaceX has done a number of things legacy corporations regarded as impractical at best, impossible at worst. It is in the process of doing still more such things.
More than a few people who spent careers at legacy corporations find it hard to acknowledge that those corporations have not turned out to have represented the acme of what is possible. But this is a pattern we have seen many times before in U.S. business history. It is unlikely to be the last.
I’m sure you’re right about raptor money, but I’m right that the airfoce lost interest in it. Nobody ever said why, but probably it just sucks.
You know, I remember musk from the xprize days when Branson was also developing his character. At the time if you listened to him talk he would go on about working every waking moment, which made me hate him immediately to be honest.
Perhaps I’m just prejudiced against that sort of personality.
Still, if anyone wants to land people on the Moon, it would be wise to look at what’s already worked. I can understand a deviation from that to add a tug stage, keep a station in orbit, fly it around to develop the DST. Going to a single vehicle that has nothing in common with what already worked, I think anyone can see what a mistake that is.
Unless the person is all zapped out with the whole cult phenomenon.
I’m also bummed out by the sudden breakup with Russia. That’s contributing to my inability to dig the whole newspace thing, my impatience with it.
Likely to have echoes of the current situation between Dragon and Starliner. …. But okay. It will be nice to have a UH-1 to operate alongside the C-130.
Better comparison is a Cessna 172 with a C-17 Globemaster III.
A C-172 with full tanks plays with about 500 lbs of useful payload. A UH-1 has about 3 to 4000 lb payload capability, and a Lunar Starship and C-130 have similar useful loads when fueled up.
Useful payloads depends on which model of the UH-1 and the C-130 you are referring to and the environment conditions they are operating in.
Also depending on how the Lunar Starship is refilled with propellants in orbit. It could put up to about 150 tonnes of payload on the Lunar surface.