Elon Musk’s SpaceX has received a new contract to perform a task it hasn’t yet successfully managed. It’s done something similar(ish), but that doesn’t make this any less remarkable. The launch company has been awarded a NASA services contract to ship Dragonfly to its destination.
SpaceX has been contracted to provide launch services for NASA’s Dragonfly mission. Dragonfly, if you’ve been paying attention, is a nuclear-powered lander planned for a mission to Saturn’s moon Titan sometime after 2028. The company will provide the launch platform — specifically a Falcon Heavy rocket — that will take the novel craft to its destination.
SpaceX hits the Roadster
It’ll be quite a feat for SpaceX to be involved in the New Horizons mission. It has previously sent payloads into orbit but the closest the company has come to a mission of this size was when it lobbed Elon Musk’s Tesla Roadster into a near-Martian orbit with a prototype of its space suit on a mannequin in the driver’s seat. David Bowie was playing, if memory serves, during that Falcon Heavy test flight. Hopefully, Dragonfly will be just as exciting.
The private space company will net around $256.6 million for the July 2028 mission to Saturn’s moon Titan. Should everything go as planned, NASA will have a nuclear-powered rotorcraft on the celestial body heavily favoured to harbour some form of life that exists outside of our planet.
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NASA’s mission hopes to “characterize the habitability of Titan’s environment, investigate the progression of prebiotic chemistry on Titan, where carbon-rich material and liquid water may have mixed for an extended period, and search for chemical indications of whether water-based or hydrocarbon-based life once existed on Saturn’s moon”.
It’ll also examine the viability of setting up a refuelling station out near Saturn. Titan contains the components needed to create rocket fuel in astronomical amounts, potentially serving as a launch pad for deeper exploration of the remarkably mysterious humans find themselves inhabiting.