Would NASA be interested in buying instrument payload slots from Planetary Space Science Corporations?

[fredinno]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astrobotic_Technology

Would NASA be interested in buying instrument payload slots from Planetary Space Science Corporations like Astrobiotic Technology?

Astrobiotic is a competitor for the Google Lunar XPrize planning to build probes to land on the Moon, and selling payload capacity to customers ($1.8-2 Million/kg of payload, depending on if the payload is attached to a rover or lander. Considering the total capacity of one lunar lander (w/o a rover) would be 210 kg of total science equipment payload (to be launched on a Falcon 9- these landers near the Falcon 9's max capacity to the lunar surface) 210 kg of instrument space would cost about $378 Million. Of course, the instruments must be bought separately from elsewhere, so the total cost would be near the $Five-hundred Million Discovery Mission cost cap. Would it be worth it, and could something like this be financed?

[Spaceception]

Probably, seeing as NASA would have a lot of potential science to gain without much cost increase  (Or at least time increase) compared to them building a probe from scratch (Which would take years of planning/developing/constructing)..

[wumpus]

Presumably the whole point of funding them originally was to have this type of thing available.  $2M (or so, the wiki doesn't mention the money in the Lunar Catalyst initiative) might be peanuts to NASA, but they did spend it.

[fredinno]

9 minutes ago, wumpus said:

Presumably the whole point of funding them originally was to have this type of thing available.  $2M (or so, the wiki doesn't mention the money in the Lunar Catalyst initiative) might be peanuts to NASA, but they did spend it.

Huh, interesting.

[mcirish3]

Essentially is this not what space X is, and is spaceX not now currently the primary way NASA gets things to space?

[fredinno]

3 hours ago, mcirish3 said:

Essentially is this not what space X is, and is spaceX not now currently the primary way NASA gets things to space?

Please speak English.

[mcirish3]

4 hours ago, fredinno said:

Please speak English.

??

 

[fredinno]

5 hours ago, mcirish3 said:

??

 

I don't get what you were saying, please rephrase.

[Nibb31]

Read it again, it was perfectly correct English.

[ModZero]

16 hours ago, mcirish3 said:

Essentially is this not what space X is, and is spaceX not now currently the primary way NASA gets things to space?

Not really, NASA is mostly using a mix of Space X and ULA launchers, and will probably want to keep it like that to avoid vendor lock-in.

[mcirish3]

37 minutes ago, ModZero said:

Not really, NASA is mostly using a mix of Space X and ULA launchers, and will probably want to keep it like that to avoid vendor lock-in.

Ok, fair enough but my first and primary point still stands;

17 hours ago, mcirish3 said:

Essentially is this not what space X is

Edited January 14, 2016 by mcirish3

[fredinno]

5 hours ago, ModZero said:

Not really, NASA is mostly using a mix of Space X and ULA launchers, and will probably want to keep it like that to avoid vendor lock-in.

NASA used only Atlas V for previous years, when Falcon 9 wasn't available...

22 hours ago, mcirish3 said:

Essentially is this not what space X is, and is spaceX not now currently the primary way NASA gets things to space?

Ok, SpaceX will likely launch stuff into space for NASA in the future- likely smaller payloads, since Falcon has fail BLEO capacity. However, Planetary's landers can only launch on a Falcon 9 or Atlas V 402/403/504 due to its size. The former was chosen due to being cheaper.