the background
People have not traveled beyond Earth’s orbit since the Apollo program ended in 1972. NASA has been officially trying to change this since 2004, when President George W. Bush announced what became the Constellation Agency’s program back to the moon.
In 2010, the Obama administration canceled the Constellation, but two key pieces of the program survived: the Orion crew capsule and a rocket that became what is now the space launch system or SLS. Both vehicles are developed using the classic “cost-plus” contracts, where NASA pays the full cost of the development, even if the costs increase far beyond the initial estimates.
NASA’s Artemis program will use SLS to explode astronauts into lunar orbit aboard Orion, where they will encounter a previously placed lunar lander to travel to the surface and back. Orion will also dock in the future with Gateway, a small space station in lunar orbit. From there, astronauts can conduct science and transfer to lunar landings.
Instead of building a monthly lander indoors, as it does with SLS and Orion, NASA chose to pay space companies a fixed price to build their own monthly landers, which the companies will own. In turn, NASA may purchase ongoing landing services from these providers. Therefore, the total cost to NASA is fixed – any cost overruns are borne by companies.
On the contrary, if companies can deliver their landings for costs lower than the cost of the contract, the company retains the difference in profit. NASA has successfully deployed this model for transporting crews and cargo to the ISS.
Encouraged by a business-friendly White House that imposed a landing on the moon in 2024, NASA has expanded its use of public-private partnerships beyond Earth’s low orbit, creating new programs for monthly commercial deliveries of payloads of scientific instruments and missions. technology demonstrations. Last year, the agency funded SpaceX, Blue Origin and Dynetics to develop lander concepts for Artemis and proposed spending nearly $ 21 billion over the next five years to support more human landing vehicles.
But despite strong support from the White House, Congress last year provided only $ 850 million for monthly landers – well below the $ 3.4 billion NASA has requested. Faced with a funding shortfall, NASA has delayed the decision to select companies that will receive funding for the continued development of their monthly landings.
That is, until last week, when NASA announced that they would go all-in on the Starship.
NASA would probably have wanted to choose more providers for redundancy. But with little funding left and the prospect of seeing the moon’s landings move away for years, they chose the cheapest – and most likely success – option: SpaceX.