Rocket Lab gets launch contract for lunar cubesat
Capitalism in space: NASA has awarded Rocket Lab the contract to launch the privately-built, for NASA, lunar orbiting cubesat CAPSTONE, designed to test technologies and the orbital mechanics required to build its Gateway lunar space station.
This quote says it all:
The firm-fixed-price launch contract is valued at $9.95 million. In September, NASA awarded a $13.7 million contract to Advanced Space of Boulder, Colorado, to develop and operate the CubeSat.
Using two different private companies, one to build the satellite and the other to launch it, NASA will get a lunar orbiter for just over $23 million. That total equals the rounding error for almost all NASA-built projects.
The launch is set for early 2021.
The support of my readers through the years has given me the freedom and ability to analyze objectively the ongoing renaissance in space, as well as the cultural changes -- for good or ill -- that are happening across America. Four years ago, just before the 2020 election I wrote that Joe Biden's mental health was suspect. Only in the past two weeks has the mainstream media decided to recognize that basic fact.
Fourteen years ago I wrote that SLS and Orion were a bad ideas, a waste of money, would be years behind schedule, and better replaced by commercial private enterprise. Even today NASA and Congress refuses to recognize this reality.
In 2020 when the world panicked over COVID I wrote that the panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Only in the past year have some of our so-called experts in the health field have begun to recognize these facts.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
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Capitalism in space: NASA has awarded Rocket Lab the contract to launch the privately-built, for NASA, lunar orbiting cubesat CAPSTONE, designed to test technologies and the orbital mechanics required to build its Gateway lunar space station.
This quote says it all:
The firm-fixed-price launch contract is valued at $9.95 million. In September, NASA awarded a $13.7 million contract to Advanced Space of Boulder, Colorado, to develop and operate the CubeSat.
Using two different private companies, one to build the satellite and the other to launch it, NASA will get a lunar orbiter for just over $23 million. That total equals the rounding error for almost all NASA-built projects.
The launch is set for early 2021.
The support of my readers through the years has given me the freedom and ability to analyze objectively the ongoing renaissance in space, as well as the cultural changes -- for good or ill -- that are happening across America. Four years ago, just before the 2020 election I wrote that Joe Biden's mental health was suspect. Only in the past two weeks has the mainstream media decided to recognize that basic fact.
Fourteen years ago I wrote that SLS and Orion were a bad ideas, a waste of money, would be years behind schedule, and better replaced by commercial private enterprise. Even today NASA and Congress refuses to recognize this reality.
In 2020 when the world panicked over COVID I wrote that the panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Only in the past year have some of our so-called experts in the health field have begun to recognize these facts.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are five ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
3. A Paypal Donation:
5. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652
You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above. And if you buy the books through the ebookit links, I get a larger cut and I get it sooner.
Isn’t 10 mil more than double what rocket lab charges for commercial launches?
Eric: I’d have to do some digging (can’t now, about to go out) but assuming you are right I think the reason for the higher price is need to get to lunar orbit. Requires an extra upper booster.
That’s very good news. Spacecraft and launches have been astronomically expense for far too long. It’s taken until 2020 (despite Falcon9 fly for the last 5 years) for prices to start to drop significant *for NASA projects*. IPXE and your example above is the evidence.
It’s time for NASA to structure it’s spacecraft acquisition and funding programs to utilize these price points and costs.
Rocket Lab’s website talks a little about an upper stage that is able to take payloads beyond low Earth orbit (LEO), which is what their previous launches did, to Lunar orbit.
https://www.rocketlabusa.com/news/updates/rocket-lab-to-deliver-payloads-to-the-moon-and-beyond-with-photon/
It would seem that this upper stage is at least part of the cost that is beyond the usual LEO launch price.
Fred,
As companies, countries, and national space programs, such as NASA, take lower launch costs into account, they realize that they are able to afford missions that they previously could not perform. BulgariaSat 1 is a good example.
https://behindtheblack.com/behind-the-black/points-of-information/bulgaria-credits-spacexs-low-costs-for-making-its-satellite-possible/
SpaceX brought about a major change in the way people think about access to space. This is one reason why so many people are such fans of the company. SpaceX is bringing about a revolution that makes possible the dreams of the 1950s, the ideas of the 1960s, and the plans of the 1970s. When the Space Shuttle failed to make access to space cheap and easy, all those dreams, ideas, and plans crashed and burned.
This past decade, the reduced cost to launch, both by SpaceX and as proposed by Blue Origin, has turned those dreams into a different set of ideas, ideas that take the reduced costs into account. Plans are being made to turn those ideas into reality during the next decade or so.
So far, for manned exploration beyond LEO, NASA is still counting more on the future SLS than it is on the current Falcon rockets, the future BFR class of rockets, the future New Glenn rocket, or the future Vulcan rocket. I would say that NASA is wisely relying upon existing rockets over future rockets, but SLS is still under development, and it has been slipping badly over the past few years, so the wisdom of relying upon it is questionable.
Just curious when we’ll start talking about ‘boosters’ rather than ‘rockets’?
Blair Ivey,
There are times when I get more technical than when I wrote that post. Often the industry will specify a rocket that takes a payload to orbit as a launch vehicle, but that can be a little bit of a mouthful, even when reading, so the word “rocket” just came to my mind naturally. A booster would more accurately describe many first stages and all solid rocket strap-ons, because launching from Earth requires a lot of oomph to get off the pad, and Earth-launched boosters tend to have more thrust than efficiency. The word rocket is nice, short, and generic, but it can also describe an attitude control thruster.
On the other hand, I may have been thinking too technically, at the time I wrote that post. Notice that I did not call SLS a rocket. This is because it is a system rather than a rocket. I even pondered placing the BFR class of launch vehicles within the Falcon family, the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launch vehicles.
It is hard to imagine how I could have overthought and underthought a single paragraph, but it looks like I managed to do it.