SIMPLEx – Spaceflight Now

Rocket Lab’s Mars-bound twin satellites – Blue and Gold – hit the road ahead of Blue Origin launch

August 16, 2024 Will Robinson-Smith

The twin spacecraft, named Blue and Gold, left Rocket Lab’s Long Beach facilities on Thursday to begin the trip to Florida. The EscaPADE mission will launch aboard Blue Origin’s first New Glenn rocket.

NASA selects SpaceX to launch mission studying interstellar space

September 28, 2020 Stephen Clark

NASA has awarded SpaceX a $109 million contract to launch the Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe, a NOAA space weather observatory, a robotic scout to map water on the moon, and two other ridealong payloads on a single Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral in 2024.

NASA taps SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket to launch mission to metal asteroid

March 4, 2020 Stephen Clark

NASA has selected SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket to launch a robotic mission in July 2022 to explore Psyche, a metal-rich asteroid located between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. The Psyche probe is NASA’s first mission assigned to fly on SpaceX’s heavy-lift launcher.

NASA’s first interplanetary smallsats may struggle to stay under cost caps

August 5, 2019 Stephen Clark

The first set of proposals for a new class of small robotic probes NASA wants to dispatch across the solar system came in with higher cost estimates than agency officials expected, a NASA manager said Sunday.