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Mars exploration has always been the sole horizon of national distance agencies , but NASA is trying to change that , awarding a 12 research job to individual companiesas a overture to commercial support for succeeding missions to the Red Planet .
It ’s the 2nd meter in a month that the agency has bear witness its desire for commercial funding in Mars missions , having more or lessscrapped the original Mars Sample Return missionin favor of a to - be - determined alternative , likely by secret space companies .
A total of nine companies were selected to do 12 “ conception studies ” on how they could provide Mars - link services , from warhead delivery to planetary imaging to communication relay . While each honor is relatively small — between $ 200,000 and $ 300,000 — these studies are an important first stone’s throw for NASA to well read the costs , risks , and feasibility of commercial technologies .
The company choose are Lockheed Martin , Impulse Space , and Firefly Aerospace for little payload manner of speaking and host services ; United Launch Alliance , Blue Origin , and Astrobotic for declamatory load delivery and host services ; Albedo , Redwire Space , and Astrobotic for Mars surface - image services ; and SpaceX , Lockheed Martin , and Blue Origin for next - gen electrical relay serial .
Nearly all the selected proposals would accommodate existing labor focused on the moon and Earth , NASA said in a affirmation . The 12 - week studies will conclude in August , and there ’s no warrant that they would lead to future requests for proposals or contracts . That said , it ’s similarly unlikely that future contract would appear without a study having previously been done by a company contend for it .
The companionship were source from a request for proposals put out by NASA ’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory originally this year . harmonize to that solicitation , the estimation is to develop a new paradigm for Mars exploration , one that deliver “ more frequent lower cost missions ” via partnerships between administration and diligence .
The plan is standardized to the authority ’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services ( CLPS ) program , which provides large contracts to secret company to deliver payloads to the lunation . And like CLPS , whichhelped bankroll the first successful private lunar lander(among others ) , these late awards also show that the delegacy is more and more comfortable working with smaller , earlier - stage startups working on unproved technical school .
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