WASHINGTON — The European Space Agency sees strong interest from industry in a new initiative to support development of commercial cargo vehicles, a step towards a European human spaceflight capability.
ESA released a call for proposals, which the agency calls an invitation to tender (ITT), Dec. 20 for its LEO Cargo Return Service program. The program, announced by the agency in November after a Space Summit meeting in Seville, Spain, is patterned on NASA’s Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program that led to the development of SpaceX’s Dragon and Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus cargo spacecraft.
Proposals for the first phase of the program are due to ESA at the end of February. The agency expects to select up to three companies for initial contracts with a combined value of 75 million euros ($82 million) to begin design work on those vehicles. ESA hopes to award those contracts by the next Space Summit meeting, scheduled for late May in Brussels.
The long-term goal of the program is to have commercial cargo vehicles in service to the International Space Station by 2028. “We’ve got a very, very challenging target date of launching two demo flights to the International Space Station by the end of 2028 by two different providers,” said Samantha Cristoforetti, an ESA astronaut working on the cargo program, during a Jan. 23 panel discussion at the European Space Conference in Brussels.
“It’s a challenge for us at ESA and obviously it’s a challenge for industry,” she continued, “to make things happen at a speed that, let’s say, is not necessarily typical of the classical ESA development programs we’ve seen.”
Another challenge will be financing. The 75 million euros will fund a first phase of the program lasting two years. A second phase, which will cover development of the vehicles and execution of the demo mission to the ISS, will be funded at ESA’s next ministerial meeting in late 2025.
Daniel…
Read the full article here