NASA places $10M down on Mars pattern return proposals from Blue Origin, SpaceX and others

It seems the area trade has plenty of concepts on the right way to enhance NASA’s $11 billion, 15-year plan to gather and return samples from Mars. Seven of those proposals have caught the company’s consideration. 

Introduced right this moment, NASA has awarded $1.5 million contracts to seven firms to additional develop their plans for the revamped Mars Pattern Return mission. The awardees, and the title of their proposals, are as follows: 

• Lockheed Martin: “Lockheed Martin Fast Mission Design Research for Mars Pattern Return”
• SpaceX: “Enabling Mars Pattern Return With Starship”
• Aerojet Rocketdyne: “A Excessive-Efficiency Liquid Mars Ascent Automobile, Utilizing Extremely Dependable and Mature Propulsion Applied sciences, to Enhance Program Affordability and Schedule”
• Blue Origin: “Leveraging Artemis for Mars Pattern Return”
• Quantum Area: “Quantum Anchor Leg Mars Pattern Return Research”
• Northrop Grumman: “Excessive TRL MAV Propulsion Trades and Idea Design for MSR Fast Mission Design”
• Whittinghill Aerospace: “A Fast Design Research for the MSR Single Stage Mars Ascent Automobile”

A complete of ten research — together with two NASA facilities, and the company’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Utilized Physics Laboratory — have been chosen to supply research. These have been chosen after the company put out a request for proposals in April. 

The titles don’t actually say very a lot in any respect in regards to the respective proposals — for instance, it’s no shock that SpaceX is providing up Starship for a mission to Mars, however how precisely the automobile can be enabled to gather and return samples remains to be unclear. That’s the entire level of the examine interval: to assist NASA perceive whether or not there are viable various mission designs or mission parts to deliver Martian samples house safely. 

In response to the request for proposal, research may very well be for full overhauls of the mission design, or for designs that embrace parts of NASA’s MSR mission or NASA’s Artemis program. 

NASA turned to personal trade after lastly admitting that its structure for MSR is extremely sophisticated. Actually, it’s a little bit of a misnomer to even name it a single mission, on condition that the plan concerned the Perseverance rover, a novel pattern retrieval lander, a rocket known as a Mars Ascent Automobile, and an Earth return orbiter. These autos would wish to work in good synchronicity to gather and transport the samples. 

Final yr, an impartial evaluation board advisable that NASA revisit the mission design given the issues in regards to the technical options and the excessive prices. So the company is doing simply that: In paperwork associated to the RFP, NASA mentioned its searching for a much less advanced mission design and one which would scale back the whole prices to the company. The company additionally mentioned it was searching for the earliest doable return date. 

Corporations will begin work in July and full their research in October.