Space News - NASA about to begin a Lunar COTS program

So on this last live show there's a little bit of news that we didn't quite get to in the news segment so we wanted to feature that now. Mike, you had some interesting information about the Lunar COTS program. What's going on over there? Yeah, Lunar COTS might actually be a real thing. So what this is is that NASA has pretty much announced that they are preparing a solicitation to have another competition like the COTS program to deliver cargo to the International Space Station and for this one they're serious about sending cargo to the lunar surface and with this this is this is all based on a request for information that NASA put out back in May and they've since evaluated the results of that and there's several companies that they are expecting to bid on commercial cargo services to the lunar surface. So this is really exciting and there's just a couple of companies that are expected to bid on this and this all comes from actually a testimony meeting before Congress where representatives from NASA as well as Moon Express, Astrobotic and Blue Origin talked about the benefits of this type of plan. So first off one of the companies, Moon Express, they're already participating in a lunar program that is called Lunar Catalyst and with that that has been developing, it's a really small program but it's developing technologies to enable soft touchdown and landings on the surface of the moon and with Moon Express the the vehicle that you see on the screen there is called MX-1E, it's their new design for their lander and they claim that they could start launching next year. I believe their launch provider is still going to be Rocket Lab from New Zealand and they they better start launching next year if they hope to win the Google Lunar X Prize by March of 2018. But this is just another program that's an example of life after the Google Lunar X Program and speaking of the GLXP, one of the other teams that dropped out of the GLXP race, Astrobotic, is also expected to bid and with their program they're looking at a lot of the results from this and they're really interested in what they could do with their commercial services. They've already been reaching out to several companies who kind of at this point want to send some frivolous stuff to the moon but there's also some experiments that they want to send as well. Now the thing that I'm really excited about is Blue Origin who also testified at this meeting on Thursday and they have some bigger plans than Moon Express or Astrobotic, at least initially. Under their proposal they're calling Blue Moon, they would have a system that would be capable of delivering several tons of cargo to the lunar surface and that vehicle, they're hoping to launch that on NASA's space launch system, I'm sure kind of as a political move to get support for this, or even Blue Origin's own New Glenn rocket once that monstrosity starts flying. So I'm unclear in this image whether or not that was the one that is their Blue Moon that would be able to deliver several tons. It looks more along the size of like the smaller kind of classes to have small instruments and payloads go to the surface of the moon but I'm unsure about that since there's few details about their exact architecture for their Blue Moon program at the moment. But in any case this is looking more and more like a real thing and it tells us a little bit more about the direction that NASA wants to go in for our human acceleration plans. All right Mike, appreciate that update. If you are interested in news like this or more feel free to check out this last show episode 10.33. We also were talking with Stuart Money about the history of SpaceX and you can always join us live at 1800 Coordinated Universal Time every Saturday.