NASA Signs $93 Mln Deal to Study Moon

NASA signed contract worth $93.3 million with Firefly Aerospace, a company based in Cedar Park, Texas, to carry out a mission to conduct experiments and test new technologies on the Moon, according to Bloomberg report, on Friday.

The mission which Firefly will carry out mostly, will feed into NASA’s Artemis program. As part of the project, the agency has been awarding contracts to companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin to speed up its timeline. But in recent weeks it’s become unclear if NASA will be able to meet its ambitious 2024 target for putting humans back on the moon.

Earlier, Firefly firm acquired technology tied to Israel’s Beresheet lunar lander that crashed into the Moon in 2019.

However, Markusic, the Firefly's CEO explained that the firm will largely build Blue Ghost from scratch. “This is 100 percent American technology,” Markusic said. The company has created preliminary designs for the spacecraft and will have much work to do to meet its second half of 2023 launch date target.

Firefly has been trying to carve out a unique path in the suddenly frenetic commercial space industry. The company does not make huge rockets like Elon Musk’s SpaceX, nor does it make small rockets like Peter Beck’s Rocket Lab, and a number of other start-ups. Its first rocket  called Alpha, can carry about 2,200 pounds of cargo into orbit for $15 million per flight.

Noteworthy, at the end of January, NASA had quietly pushed back the award timeframe for two lander contracts from late February to the end of April. Additionally, in its latest spending bill, Congress only allocated $850 million to NASA’s Human Landing System project, instead of the $3.2 billion the agency had requested.