In a first, NASA is outsourcing its next moon lander to a private company

[Elderberry]

Washington Post By Sarah Kaplan 11/29/2018

NASA’s next lunar science experiments will arrive at the moon via a spacecraft built by one of nine private companies — a first for one of the agency’s science missions.

In an announcement Thursday, the space agency named the organizations that are now eligible to bid on delivering science and technology payloads to the lunar surface. They include longtime players in the aerospace industry, like Lockheed Martin, but are mostly newer names with start-up cultures, such as Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic and Masten Space Systems in Mojave, Calif.

The Commercial Lunar Payload Services program is a priority of NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, who said in May that leveraging commercial capabilities would allow for more frequent and affordable access to the lunar surface. “More missions, more science,” a news release about the CLPS program promised.

It also continues a trend at NASA toward public-private partnerships for exploration. Under President George W. Bush, companies were awarded contracts to fly cargo to the International Space Station. The Commercial Crew Program, developed under President Barack Obama, will pay companies to transport human crews.

The CLPS missions would be the agency’s first such partnership in deep space. The first could fly as early as next year, and NASA hopes to send two payloads each year for the next 10 years. It’s not yet clear what kind of instruments NASA hopes to send, though the first call for proposals might come out in the coming weeks or months.

Most of the companies involved have never flown a spacecraft of this complexity and scale, and Bridenstine acknowledged that some of the CLPS missions will likely fail to achieve a “soft” landing on the lunar surface.

More: https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2018/11/29/first-nasa-is-outsourcing-its-next-moon-lander-private-company/

[Doug Loss]

This is exactly how NASA should be handling such stuff.  There's no reason whatsoever (other than political) for NASA to use government funds to duplicate capabilities that can be purchased from private contractors.  This is analogous to the post office contracting private air carriers to do their air mail deliveries, in the 1930's.  If the post office had to develop it's own aircraft and create the bureaucracy needed to run a totally government air mail delivery service, neither private air freight or passenger carriage would have happened nearly so quickly as it did, nor would the cost of air mail delivery have gotten to the point where it was affordable to the general public.

[Skeptic]

Seems a hard decision to make and NASA would probably send some of its employees to work with the companies awarded contracts, the employees who joined so that they can build spaceships. I wouldn't be surprised if some of those startups were NASA trojans themselves, created to operate as satellite companies.