Musk’s SpaceX wins NASA award to supply planned lunar space station

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NASA on Friday picked a brand new house capsule from Elon Musk’s SpaceX to ferry cargo and provides to the company’s deliberate lunar house station, a vital constructing block to its plans to construct a everlasting submit on the moon and mount future missions to Mars.

SpaceX will get a portion of a $7 billion NASA contract to make use of its largest rocket, Falcon Heavy, to ship a brand new “Dragon XL” spacecraft to the Lunar Gateway, an outpost NASA plans to construct that may orbit the moon someday inside the subsequent decade.

SpaceX founder and chief engineer Elon Musk attends a post-launch information convention to debate the SpaceX Crew Dragon astronaut capsule in-flight abort check on the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, U.S. January 19, 2020. Photo: Reuters/File

The Dragon XL spacecraft, the newest variant in Musk’s lineup of so-called Dragon cargo and astronaut capsules, will carry analysis provides that may assist future astronauts on the floor of the moon accumulate lunar samples, a NASA announcement stated.

The Dragon variant, which might be docked on the orbital station for six to 12 months per mission, is “optimized to hold greater than 5 metric tons of cargo to Gateway in lunar orbit,” SpaceX stated in a tweet.

The monetary worth of the award was not given. But it indicators a key improvement within the U.S. house company’s Artemis program to return to the moon – unveiled by Vice President Mike Pence a 12 months in the past this week — and offers a win for Musk’s house firm as it really works to launch its debut manned mission to house this summer time.

The submit Musk’s SpaceX wins NASA award to provide deliberate lunar house station appeared first on The Himalayan Times.

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