Mars exploration has always been the exclusive province of national space agencies, but NASA is trying to change that, award a dozen research tasks to private companies as a prelude to commercial support for future missions to the Red Planet.
It is the second time in a month that the agency has shown its desire for commercial support of missions to Mars, having more or less scrapped the original Mars Sample Return mission in favor of a yet-to-be-determined alternative, likely by private space companies.
A total of nine companies were selected to conduct twelve “conceptual studies” on how they could provide Mars-related services, from payload delivery to planetary imaging and communications relays. While each award is relatively small ($200,000 to $300,000), these studies are an important first step toward NASA better understanding the costs, risks, and feasibility of commercial technologies.
The selected companies are: Lockheed Martin, Impulse Space and Firefly Aerospace for small payload hosting and delivery services; United Launch Alliance, Blue Origin and Astrobotic for large payload hosting and delivery services; Albedo, Redwire Space and Astrobotic for Mars surface imaging services; and SpaceX, Lockheed Martin and Blue Origin for next-generation broadcast series.
Almost all of the selected proposals would adapt existing projects focused on the Moon and Earth, NASA said in a statement. The twelve-week studies will conclude in August and there is no guarantee they will lead to future requests for proposals or contracts. That said, it is equally unlikely that future contracts will appear without a study having been previously carried out by a company that competes for them.
The companies emerged from a request for proposals put out by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory earlier this year. According to that request, the idea is to develop a new paradigm for Mars exploration, one that offers “more frequent and lower-cost missions” through government-industry partnerships.
The plan is similar to the agency's Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, which offers large contracts to private companies to deliver payloads to the moon. And like CLPS, which helped fund the first successful private lunar lander (among others), these latest awards also show that the agency is increasingly comfortable working with smaller, early-stage startups working on untested technology.
