TITUSVILLE, Fla. — NASA has added milestones and funding to agreements with two companies working on commercial space station concepts using money from a third agreement that ended last year.
NASA announced Jan. 5 that it added a combined $99.5 million in funding to existing Space Act Agreements with Blue Origin and Voyager Space. The two companies received the original agreements in December 2021 as part of NASA’s Commercial Low Earth Orbit Destinations, or CLD, program to spur development of commercial space stations intended to succeed the International Space Station.
Blue Origin, which is developing the Orbital Reef space station with Sierra Space and other companies, received an increase of $42 million to its original $130 million award. The increase includes additional milestones for subsystem design reviews and technology maturation, as well as work on the station’s life support systems.
Voyager Space, which is partnered with Airbus Defence and Space to develop the Starlab station, received $57.5 million in additional funding on its $160 million award. That will go towards various development milestones for the station as well as work to upgrade Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus cargo spacecraft to enable it to dock directly with the station rather than be berthed to it by a robotic arm.
“The milestones target key technology and risk reduction areas of our partners’ designs,” said Phil McAlister, director of commercial space at NASA Headquarters, in a statement about the revised agreements. “The milestones also include additional hardware testing, which is critically important to any spaceflight development effort.”
The funding comes primarily from a third CLD agreement that NASA awarded to Northrop Grumman. Northrop announced in October that it would no longer pursue its own space station but instead would work with Voyager Space on Starlab, including providing a version of Cygnus to transport cargo to Starlab.
As part…
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