WASHINGTON — NASA is developing an updated rideshare policy for science missions that reflects each recent launch opportunities in addition to challenges faced in accommodating secondary payloads.
During a presentation at a gathering 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 capability on launches of science missions to hold smallsat secondary payloads. NASA established a rideshare office to coordinate those opportunities in 2020.
That “very significant” update, she said, would come with other rideshare opportunities. The unique policy involved excess capability on NASA science mission launches, but the brand new one will include the Enterprise-Class Acquisition of Dedicated and Rideshare (VADR) contract vehicle in addition to other options, resembling rideshare launches on NASA Artemis missions and from other government agencies.
“The policy really covers the responsibilities and the prices,” she said. “Every model in that kind of rideshare is different.”
The present 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. One other Falcon 9 launch in early 2025 will launch the SPHEREx astrophysics mission as its primary payload with one other heliophysics mission, PUNCH, flying as a secondary.
That approach has had some difficulties. IMAP at one point was slated to hold 4 rideshare payloads. One, NASA’s Solar Cruiser mission, was not confirmed for development. The opposite, the Lunar Trailblazer lunar orbiter spacecraft, moved off IMAP to avoid what on the time seemed to be a two-year delay in its launch, with NASA as a substitute acquiring a secondary payload slot on IM-2, the second Intuitive Machines lunar lander mission.
Mendoza-Hill suggested that call could have backfired on the mission. “They might launch before IMAP, perhaps not,” she said. “They’re launching straight away six months [early] only. They were initially two years earlier.”
Lunar Trailblazer was one among three missions chosen by NASA’s planetary science division through a program called SIMPLEx that planned to make use of rideshare missions. The opposite two, ESCAPADE and Janus, were originally manifested as secondaries on the launch of the Psyche mission. Nevertheless, a change in mission trajectories led NASA to remove ESCAPADE while Psyche’s 14-month launch delay meant that Janus couldn’t perform its planned mission.
NASA subsequently acquired a launch for ESCAPADE on Blue Origin’s Recent Glenn rocket using the VADR contract. That launch, scheduled for late 2024, shall be the primary flight of that rocket. The agency, though, effectively canceled the Janus mission in July, putting the spacecraft into long-term storage.
Unique requirements for NASA science missions, even smallsat missions, could make it difficult to seek out adequate rideshare opportunities. “All of our missions are different. They’ve unique trajectories. All of them have different science,” she said. That rules out the usage of launches like SpaceX’s Transporter series, which launches spacecraft to sun-synchronous orbit, or its recent Bandwagon line of mid-inclination rideshare launches.
The emergence of orbital transfer vehicles, or tugs, could remove a few of those constraints, but she argued those vehicles aren’t mature enough yet. “They are only not there, technology-wise. Hopefully they shall be there because that may open up rather a lot more opportunities for smallsats,” she said.
NASA is currently on-ramping recent providers for the VADR contract, and Mendoza-Hill said she believed that may include recent orbital transfer vehicles, like Blue Origin’s Blue Ring tug that the corporate publicly announced in October.
She discussed on the meeting other challenges with rideshares, resembling coupled loads analyses which are needed to make sure that the addition of secondary payloads don’t affect the first payload during launch. Rideshare payloads also need a greater degree of mission assurance to avoid affecting the first.
“Small missions could have to spend a bit of more cash on mission assurance to make the most of rideshare to ride together with the upper mission assurance launches,” she said. “It’s not free, but it surely’s still price the associated fee of finding a launch.”