Is fun as it was to tease Blue Origin for being an exclusively suborbital launch provider, this is no longer true. They achieved orbit with the maiden flight of New Glenn back in January. New Glenn is still yet to have its second launch, but BO are technically an orbital launch company now.
Ask the ESCAPADE team if this is a good idea. Mark 1 Pathfinder isn’t launching this year, so Mark 1 with VIPER isn’t launching next year. Now NASA gets to keep paying for storage and waiting and wondering.
Also, calling Pathfinder a CLPS program is a joke. Blue was doing it anyways, and NASA paid for a single payload to get landing plume data, which, given the track record, will just be crash landing data.
To be fair, Astrobotic Griffin 1 shouldn’t have had a payload this valuable without being proven first, but a hypothetical Griffin 2 could have.
Is fun as it was to tease Blue Origin for being an exclusively suborbital launch provider, this is no longer true. They achieved orbit with the maiden flight of New Glenn back in January. New Glenn is still yet to have its second launch, but BO are technically an orbital launch company now.
Don’t worry, I’m here to hate accurately.
Ask the ESCAPADE team if this is a good idea. Mark 1 Pathfinder isn’t launching this year, so Mark 1 with VIPER isn’t launching next year. Now NASA gets to keep paying for storage and waiting and wondering.
Also, calling Pathfinder a CLPS program is a joke. Blue was doing it anyways, and NASA paid for a single payload to get landing plume data, which, given the track record, will just be crash landing data.
To be fair, Astrobotic Griffin 1 shouldn’t have had a payload this valuable without being proven first, but a hypothetical Griffin 2 could have.