A Little on NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services Program

I have to say that Eric Berger at Ars Technica came up with a story headline that hooked me immediately.  I had to read it.  The attention grabber was, "NASA is supporting some seriously risky missions to the Moon—it’s about time."  

He begins by referring to the big program everyone has heard about: Artemis.  NASA supports this program to the tune of nearly $7.5 billion per year, and for that the program's whole purpose is twofold.  The first purpose is probably the one that keeps the funding coming; its identity politics-style mission to land "the first woman and the next man" on the moon.  The second, more important reason is to start to establish a sustainable presence in deep space.  

Buried relatively deep in NASA's itemized budget, though, we find that they're funding a much smaller program called the Commercial Lunar Payload Services Program or CLPS, at about 3% of the level of Artemis funding.  Practically, a rounding error in the Artemis budget.  The purpose of the CLPS program is to use private companies to send small- and medium-size landers to the Moon's surface for primarily science-based missions.  

Like the Artemis program, the origin of CLPS can be traced to the middle of the Trump administration, when White House officials sought to refocus NASA's exploration programs on the Moon in 2018 after a long period of heavy focus on Mars. This shift resonated with the associate administrator in charge of NASA's science programs, Thomas Zurbuchen, who came into office in late 2016.

Since the end of the Apollo program in the 1970s, NASA had sent a handful of orbiters to the Moon but had not made a soft landing there in more than four decades. In the meantime, the space agency had landed half a dozen times on Mars and explored the rest of the Solar System.

It was a good time.  The agency had started the commercial cargo contracts a couple of years before that, so that our burgeoning private sector space companies could carry cargo to the Space Station and those missions were starting to run smoothly.  It would still be a couple of years before SpaceX would launch American astronauts from Florida, but the commercial crew program that resulted in that capability had been running successfully for years.  Meanwhile, water had been confirmed in ices around the moon's south pole leading to the thought that it might be a good place to plant a colony.  Ice meant water and water also meant rocket fuel as well its role in life support.  The commercial space industry, spurred in part by the Google Lunar XPrize, had also started working on innovative moon landers. 

After selecting a pool of a dozen US companies eligible to bid, NASA started to competitively award contracts valued at between $80 million and $100 million in May 2019 for lunar delivery missions. These costs were far less than NASA would have paid as part of a traditional procurement process.

Associate administrator Zurbuchen, consistently told policymakers there was a 50-50 chance of success for early CLPS missions.  

“You have to buy in on the risk,” Zurbuchen said. “If the chance of success needs to be 80 percent, I need to put a safety and mission assurance program onto it. And I don’t want to do that because then I’m squeezing some of the entrepreneurial energy. I just really believe that the entrepreneurial ecosystem is one of the core strengths of the United States. We’re second to none. And if we’re not using that as part of our leadership paradigm, we’re missing out.”

And then came VIPER.  

The accepted 50/50 risk of throwing the money away, and small budget probes starts to look different if the probe is bigger budget, and more important.  Then VIPER, the Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover came to the top of the list of missions NASA really wanted, and Zurbuchen oversaw rewarding a start-up company called Astrobotic a $200 million dollar contract to design, build, and launch the probe to the south pole by 2023.  In a lunar lander they still haven't flown.  

This is an important scientific mission tasked with searching for ice at the south pole and using a one-meter drill to prospect for subsurface samples. The total value of the mission is $660 million, and it matters to scientists and NASA's human exploration division, which hopes to send astronauts to the south pole in the 2020s.

You might expect that with an important mission like this that pressure would be put on Zurbuchen and his office to give the job to someone else.  Have JPL build the probe and have one of the "old space" contractors build the lander instead of a startup from Pennsylvania.  After all the meetings and other interventions, Zurbuchen realized that if he did it the old way, he'd have to kill off all the other jobs under the CLPS. 

He was not willing to accept this. And after receiving buy-in from NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy and Associate Administrator Bob Cabana, Zurbuchen made the decision to keep VIPER on Astrobotic's Griffin lander. As part of this move, Astrobotic agreed to subject Griffin's propulsion system to more rigorous testing. Additionally, NASA decided to build a second set of instruments as a backup plan.

So far, NASA has awarded seven CLPS missions and more might be announced this year.  Zurbuchen has said that he's OK with the 50-50 odds on smaller, cheaper missions, but wants better from programs like VIPER.  What happens if all the CLPS missions go a year producing nothing but some new, small craters on the moon?   I expect there would be some attempts to cut CLPS off, but like the others in favor of CLPS, I think that would be short term thinking.  That road is the way to worsening the arthritic bureaucracy that NASA has become, barely able to accomplish anything and only then with epic cost overruns. 

Among the most successful of the private space companies, both SpaceX and Rocket Lab have adopted a "Silicon Valley-style" iterative design methodology; fly sooner, fail sooner, learn from those mistakes, correct them and fly again.  Each test improves upon the earlier design and has a higher chance of success.  When you think about it, this was the way the early days of the space program worked and it's part of the reason there were so many important milestones during the '60s.  We're not talking about risking lives here.