NASA making its Moon mission commercial could signal a paradigm shift for deep-space travel

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NASA making its Moon mission commercial could signal a paradigm shift for deep-space travel - The Verge

NASA has the opportunity to demonstrate a new way of exploring space — will the space agency take it?


NASA is now mulling over the idea of using commercial rockets to launch a critical mission around the Moon next year instead of using the massive rocket that the agency has been building for the last decade. Such a drastic change would not only upend flight plans for this particular mission, but it could also have big implications on how ambitious space travel programs are conducted in the future.

The impetus for this new commercial focus is to maintain the agency’s launch schedule. NASA’s rocket, the Space Launch System, or SLS, is taking much longer to make than expected and probably won’t be ready to fly by its current target launch date of June 2020, whereas other commercial vehicles already on the market are ready to fly right now.

Making this revision would not be a simple swap. NASA would need not one commercial rocket but two in order to make the mission happen. The agency will also need to develop new technologies and figure out how to piece together certain vehicles in space in order to ensure that its mission can actually make it all the way out to the Moon.
 
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