SIMPLEx – Spaceflight Now

NASA selects SpaceX to launch mission studying interstellar space

September 28, 2020

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

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

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.