NASA invites private partners to bid for Lunar payload launches before manned mission

NASA has issued another request to its 14 Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) partners to bid for the opportunity to launch a future payload to the 'Moon'. This announcement came after the latest advancement of its Artemis lunar efforts. In this request, NASA has asked its private space partners to fly 10 NASA science investigations and technology demonstrations to a non-polar region of the Moon in 2022. 

These 14 CLPS private space agencies are owned by NASA which are used for various missions. The reason behind using these companies is that NASA can launch its missions quickly without having to develop technology and systems itself. All NASA has to do is pay a private company that already has the technology and system the space agency requires for its mission.

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Requests issued to 14 CLPS for NASA Moon mission 

This time around, the space agency has reached out to all its 14 space agencies for the NASA Moon mission. As per the sources, one CLPS partner will be picked by NASA to launch all of its 10 payloads to the Moon. These 10 payloads include a variety of technology and science efforts which will help NASA to learn many facts about the Moon so that it can prepare for its future manned lunar missions and potential long-term habitation. 

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NASA on September 8, Tuesday, detailed each of these payloads which will be used for the NASA Moon mission. The 10 payloads include things like Lunar GNSS receiver Experiment, MAVEN, RadPC, Regolith Adherence Characterization, and much more. The upcoming NASA Moon mission will help in investigating things like how Moon's dust sticks to different types of materials, how does heat flow from Moon's interior, GPS-related technologies, an electric field that'll work as a 'dust shield' and much more.

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The space agency informed that the announcement of the selected CLPS partner who will launch payload for the NASA Moon mission will be done sometimes later in this year. This will be the 6th surface task award which NASA will dish under its Artemis program. This program aims to return astronauts to the Moon by the year 2024. According to NASA this planned launch in 2022 will play a major role in laying 'the foundation' for this eventful human mission. 

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