Space.com by Mike Wall 3/23/2022
NASA plans to encourage the development of another commercial vehicle that can land its Artemis astronauts on the moon.Multiple private spacecraft will be ferrying NASA astronauts to the surface of the moon just a few years from now, if all goes according to plan.
In April 2021, NASA picked SpaceX to build the first crewed lunar lander for the agency's Artemis program, which is working to put astronauts on the moon in the mid-2020s and establish a sustainable human presence on and around Earth's nearest neighbor by the end of the decade.
But SpaceX apparently won't have the moon-landing market cornered: NASA announced today (March 23) that it plans to support the development of a second privately built crewed lunar lander.
"This strategy expedites progress toward a long-term, sustaining lander capability as early as the 2026 or 2027 timeframe," Lisa Watson-Morgan, program manager for the Human Landing System Program at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama, said in a statement today.
"We expect to have two companies safely carry astronauts in their landers to the surface of the moon under NASA's guidance before we ask for services, which could result in multiple experienced providers in the market," Watson-Morgan added.
This new plan isn't all that new, however. NASA originally intended to select multiple private crewed landers for Artemis, to have redundancy in place and to drive the teams building the vehicles through competition. But Congress didn't allocate enough funding to support the development of multiple vehicles, so NASA went solely with SpaceX in April 2021.
More:
https://www.space.com/nasa-more-artemis-moon-landers-for-astronauts
