WASHINGTON — NASA is developing an updated rideshare policy for science missions that reflects both new launch opportunities as well as challenges faced in accommodating secondary payloads.
During a presentation at a meeting last month of the National Academies’ Committee on Solar and Space Physics, Aly Mendoza-Hill, head of the rideshare office in NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, said an update to a rideshare policy for science missions was expected to be released in 2024.
The policy dates back to 2018, when Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for science, announced that the agency would use excess capacity on launches of science missions to carry smallsat secondary payloads. NASA established a rideshare office to coordinate those opportunities in 2020.
That “very significant” update, she said, would include other rideshare opportunities. The original policy involved excess capacity on NASA science mission launches, but the new one will include the Venture-Class Acquisition of Dedicated and Rideshare (VADR) contract vehicle as well as other options, such as rideshare launches on NASA Artemis missions and from other government agencies.
“The policy really covers the responsibilities and the costs,” she said. “Every model in that type of rideshare is different.”
The current policy has been used to enable launches of several science and technology demonstration missions. The Atlas 5 launch of the JPSS-2 weather satellite in 2022 included as a rideshare payload LOFTID, a NASA technology demonstration of an inflatable heat shield.
The launch of NASA’s Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP) spacecraft on a Falcon 9, scheduled for February 2025, will include NOAA’s Space Weather Follow-On spacecraft and NASA’s Carruthers Geocorona Observatory, a heliophysics mission originally named GLIDE. Another Falcon 9 launch in early 2025 will launch the SPHEREx astrophysics mission as its primary payload with…
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