NASA awards $590.4 million for four Moon missions

NASA awards $590.4 million for four Moon missions

NASA has awarded $590.4 million in contracts to Astrobotic Technology, Firefly Aerospace, and Intuitive Machines to deliver agency payloads to the lunar surface across four missions under the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative. Each of the four funded CLPS missions will carry three NASA payloads to the lunar surface: SCALPSS, LRA, and LETS — science investigations and technology demonstrations supporting NASA's Moon Base Program.

Gobble's Take: Four missions, three payloads each, and nearly $600 million committed — NASA is methodically expanding its lunar surface data network.

Source: Douglas Messier

Artemis II made history. The toilet did not cooperate.

On April 1, four astronauts strapped into an Orion capsule, flew around the Moon, and came home. The toilet clogged. Outlook Mail refused to open. The mission gathered a great deal of data anyway. The flyby produced the most detailed observations of the Moon's far side ever captured by human eye — and some of the most striking images weren't of the Moon at all, but Earth, photographed from a quarter million miles away.

Gobble's Take: Broken toilet, frozen inbox, historic mission. Turns out the bar for "success" in deep space is wonderfully elastic. Source: Perplexity Search

In Case You Missed It

Yesterday's top stories:

• Europe’s space gap is looking less like a gap and more like a canyon
• Space isn’t an empty stage in this briefing — it’s a pile of systems