NASA is looking for its new partners to help with it with the scheduled space missions, as SpaceX’s Starship rocket continues to face delays while testing is done. The U.S. space agency now depends on SpaceX’s Starship for its Artemis program. This program is something which aims to return humans to the Moon.
However, since the Starship is still in its development phase, NASA is still exploring across other companies to make sure that the future missions stay on schedule.
SpaceX has been testing the Starship for several years, but with some successful flights but even also a few explosions and even the technical setbacks. The rocket has been designed to be fully reusable and is also expected to carry astronauts and even the large cargo loads to the Moon and Mars.
Despite all the wintesssed recent progress, Starship has yet not completed all the tests which are needed for human missions.
NASA has planned to use the program Starship as the lunar lander for Artemis III, the mission that will carry astronauts to the Moon’s surface, that too, for the first time since 1972. But because of the recent Starship’s delays, that mission could now go a bit back.
Officials now also say NASA cannot afford to depend on more than one company alone for such a critical task.
As a result, NASA is now inviting even the other space companies to submit their proposals for alternative lunar landers and even the cargo vehicles. The agency also now wants to ensure that it has multiple options in case one system would face delays.
Companies like Blue Origin, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman are expected also to participate.
NASA’s partnership with all the private companies has always been a key to its recent success. SpaceX, for example has been the one which regularly carries astronauts and even the supplies to the International Space Station.
All of this done was done using its Falcon 9 rockets and Dragon spacecraft. But building a rocket as large and complex as Starship would take time and even involve many challenges, most of which are such as handling massive fuel tanks and heat shields.
