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. The four funded CLPS missions are planned to carry three NASA payloads — SCALPSS, LRA, and LETS — science investigations and technology demonstrations supporting NASA's Moon Base Program.

Gobble's Take: Four missions, three shared payloads, and nearly $600 million — NASA is treating the Moon like infrastructure.

Source: Perplexity Search

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

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