WASHINGTON – SpaceX won a NASA contract on February 4 to launch a small astrophysics spacecraft and continue the company’s series of similar agency contracts over the past two years.
NASA awarded SpaceX a contract to launch the Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization, and Ices Explorer (SPHEREx) spacecraft on a Falcon 9 in June 2024. The value of the launch contract is $ 98.8 million, which includes the launch itself and other ‘mission-related costs’, the agency said.
NASA has selected SPHEREx as the latest mission in its Medium-class explorers, or MIDEX, asrophysics missions in 2019. The spacecraft will fly with a near-infrared spectrometer to conduct a full aerial survey every six months on a mission that designed to hold at least two years of collecting data on phenomena from planetary to cosmological scales.
SPHEREx, managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, entered phase C of its development in January. While the mission was originally scheduled to launch in 2023, JPL said last month that the mission would now begin between June 2024 and April 2025, in part due to the aftermath of the pandemic. SPHEREx costs $ 242 million, an amount that does not include the value of the launch contract.
The SPHEREx contract is the latest in a series of awards for the launch of NASA science missions that SpaceX has won over the past two years. The awards include the launch of Falcon 9 from the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) planetary defense mission, Imaging X-Ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) astrophysics satellite, Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP) space science mission and Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud ocean Ecosystem (PACE) Earth Science Satellite. SpaceX also won a Falcon Heavy contract for launching the Psyche mission to the asteroid of the same name.
The contract values for those missions varied considerably, from $ 50.3 million for IXPE to $ 117 million for psyche. Among the launches of Falcon 9, the SPHEREx mission is the most expensive, with only IMAP more expensive at $ 109.4 million.
SPHEREx is a small spacecraft with an estimated mass of less than 200 kilograms. This suggests that the Falcon 9 will have significant redundant capacity, which NASA could use for flying small secondary payloads as part of a rideshare initiative. The IMAP launch in 2025 will include, for example, NASA’s Global Lyman alpha Imagers of the Dynamic Exosphere (GLIDE), Lunar Trailblazer and Solar Cruiser smallsat missions and the Space Weather Follow-On L-1 spacecraft for NOAA.