WASHINGTON – SpaceX secured a NASA contract on Feb. 4 to launch a small astrophysical spacecraft, continuing the company’s string of similar agency contracts over the past two years.
NASA has 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 selected SPHEREx as the latest mission in its Medium Class Explorers, or MIDEX, line of astrophysical missions in 2019. The spacecraft will pilot a near-infrared spectrometer to conduct a full aerial survey every six months on a mission designed to conduct at least two years, collecting data on phenomena from planetary to cosmological scale.
SPHEREx, operated by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, entered Phase C of development in January. While the mission was originally scheduled to start in 2023, JPL said last month that the mission is now scheduled to start between June 2024 and April 2025, delayed in part due to the effects of the pandemic. SPHEREx will cost $ 242 million, a figure that does not include the value of the launch contract.
The SPHEREx contract is the latest in a series of awards for launching NASA science missions that SpaceX has won over the past two years. Those awards include Falcon 9 launches 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 to launch the Psyche mission to the asteroid of the same name.
Contract values for those missions varied considerably, from $ 50.3 million for IXPE to $ 117 million for Psyche. Of the Falcon 9 launches, the SPHEREx mission is one of 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. That suggests the Falcon 9 will have significant overcapacity, which NASA can use for flying small secondary payloads as part of a ride-hailing initiative. For example, the 2025 launch of IMAP includes 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.