They’ve selected SpaceX for the lunar lander. Eddie Bernice Johnson is not happy.
I think this is a message to Congress that if they want to increase the amount of money NASA has to waste on Artemis, they’re going to have to increase the budget.
[Update a while later]
Here is the source-selection report.
I haven’t read it yet, but I wonder if the fact that SpaceX can takeoff and land with minimal blasting of regolith, with its engines so high on the vehicle, was a significant factor?
[Update a few minutes later]
Glancing through it, ouch. Dynetics Technical Rating was “Marginal.” For the highest bid…
Awww Eddie, your plans for DC statehood notwithstanding, be assured that Nelson and Melroy are not in fact immortal. They will one day require replacement, so although your party’s control of the federal government may indeed be permanent, their leadership is not.
Shorter Eddie B: “You didn’t pick our favored contractors, who are the ones who fill our campaign coffers.”
There isn’t any reason to think that the dual track NASA has been on will be ending anytime soon. Maybe after the next Presidential election things will change.
The source selection report is interesting…despite not really being a space person, I got asked to consult on one of these, and the comments sort of fall in line with what I thought about what I saw.
Maybe they realized that 50 years is about as long as a non-producing jobs program can milk the taxpayers…
Per Scott Manley, Dynetics came in over their weight budget at a time when they should have been starting out well under it, and the ApolloRedux team included demands for up-front payments that Congress had explicitly forbidden, thus making their proposal technically illegal until it was re-written in negotiations with NASA (which might have been their plan).
I was surprised that Dynetics was overweight. They planned for the same SLS variant as Blue Origin, right? How did their compact little lander wind up being not only heavier than BO, but more expensive as well? It’s a shame, I really liked their creativity.
A Dynetics enginer posting over at the NSF forums noted his surprise that Lueders did not mention serious known issues with the engines: “that was the largest technical risk on everyone’s mind.”
Of course, it is possible that the report from the Source Evaluation Panel *did* report on this issue, and Lueders for whatever reason chose not to highlight it in the SSS. Well…I suppose it is a moot point, since they came in a distant third, with the worst technical rating for the highest price. Any congressional effort to get another contractor in the mix will only avail Blue Origin’s team, and even then only with some considerable reworking.
So we’re going to have a lander larger than the orbital space station it’s travelling to and from?
At some point people are going to have to ask what we’re doing here.
Reading between the lines, I think NASA is hoping that the question gets asked.
The choice of SpaceX didn’t surprise me and neither did its award being the only one made – Congress’s backhanding of the HLS budget pretty much guaranteed that.
The two biggest surprises were National Team being the second-place bidder on price and the overall poor showing by Dynetics.
Kathy Lueders certainly proved why she was exactly the right person for the HEOMD job in making this call. It was not only the right call, it was as politically astute as anything Bridenstine ever did. I hope Nelson and Melroy allow her leash-free leave to continue the commercialization drive within HEOMD. I notice that, in addition to the high-profile SpaceX HLS award, Lueders also announced a commercialization program for lunar EVA suits that, by comparison, got virtually no attention. The woman is a national treasure. I hope she serves even longer than Gerst.
The two biggest surprises were National Team being the second-place bidder on price and the overall poor showing by Dynetics.
I was quite shocked that Dynetics couldn’t even come close to closing their mass budget. That’s….such a basic thing at this stage. And that was only the beginning of their problems, apparently.
Which starts to make sense of the fact that they went from the best technical rating of the three to “Marginal.” They must have had a super slick presentation last winter, but apparently it could not be sustained once NASA looked under the hood.
It’s a pity. I liked the architecture.
I was hoping it would be SpaceX (primary) and Dynetics (secondary) because I thought Alpaca would make a pretty good suborbital exploration vehicle. Now I’m harking back to the Golden Spike lander, the one that looked a bit like a Bell Model 47G helicopter. You could refuel them from landed Starships, and in an emergency could use them to escape to orbit for rescue.