SpaceDev is also offering lunar orbiters and derivatives of its newly revised Near Earth Asteroid Prospector (NEAP) mission for sale as turn-key commercial products.

SpaceDev Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Jim Benson made the announcement in Boulder at last week's annual convention of the Mars Society.

"We are now offering to deliver small payloads on Mars-entry trajectories for a fixed price of about $24 million. The estimated NASA procurement cost for a similar mission is thought to be significantly higher than the SpaceDev fixed price, perhaps twice as much," Benson said during his remarks at the conference, later adding that "savings of comparable magnitude are possible with SpaceDev's turn-key lunar and asteroid missions."

SpaceDev missions, unlike government-sponsored missions, will be insured against the risk of launch-vehicle failure and catastrophic failures during mission operations. SpaceDev has been working with its space-insurance broker, industry leader International Space Brokers (ISB), to define the required coverage.

During his presentation, Benson detailed that the $24M charge for the Mars probe-carrier mission was the total mission cost minus customer-provided payload costs. Such missions, designed to release one to three entry probes into the Martian atmosphere, would launch at the earliest between November 2002 and May 2003, arriving at the Red Planet in late 2003. Subsequent mission opportunities arise in 2005, 2007, 2009, etc., consistent with recurring Earth-to-Mars launch periods.

Benson challenged the Mars Society to identify and finance just such a mission. "You say things aren't happening fast enough with NASA's current Mars Exploration Program. Then decide what you want to send to Mars, get a sponsor, and just do it! Inner planet missions like this one can now be done for about the cost of a private jet or mega-yacht," he said.

For $20M SpaceDev will sell clients a lunar orbiter mission accommodating up to four payloads -- scientific instruments, advanced technologies such as the newly developing Interplanetary Internet, a Web server or other experiments. Payloads could be fixed to or ejectable from the main vehicle. With the relatively close lunar distances, very high data rates are achievable from the Moon, including real-time, high-definition TV broadcasts of lunar surface fly-overs and multiple earthrises.

SpaceDev's recent success in identifying low-cost spacecraft design approaches and in developing a range of modular microspacecraft concepts led the company to evolve its two-year-old Near Earth Asteroid Prospector (NEAP) spacecraft design into a smaller, simpler MicroNEAP. "We are in the business of producing low-cost, multi-use, modular spacecraft that can be sent to any destination in the inner solar system. NEAP -- as the MicroNEAP implementation is a seamless addition to our growing, fixed-price space-mission product line," said Benson.

NEAP is to be launched in late 2001 for a rendezvous with the near-Earth asteroid Nereus in mid-2002. SpaceDev has already negotiated a contract for one paying NEAP payload and has an agreement with the University of Arizona for delivery of an advanced imaging spectrometer instrument.

SpaceDev's commercial deep-space missions utilize a spacecraft bus (chassis) design derived from the intensive Mars mission and system definition effort completed by a SpaceDev-led team in March this year under a contract with JPL. SpaceDev's Mars Micromissions Bus Feasibility Study sought to validate earlier JPL findings that selected Mars missions are possible for less than $50M each using microspacecraft. Key to this low-cost approach is that the microspacecraft be launched as secondary payloads on the European Ariane 5 launch vehicle. Total mass of the bus, payload(s) and propellant at launch is approximately 200 kg.

JPL followed these studies in June with a competitive procurement for the first NASA Mars Micromission -- either a carrier bus delivering the proposed Mars Airplane or a communications and navigation orbiter -- arriving at Mars in December 2003. Industry proposals are currently being evaluated by JPL. The SpaceDev-led team elected not to bid on that procurement.

Benson summarized his remarks to the Mars Society by saying, "The key element to SpaceDev's business plan is to offer deep-space missions as complete commercial products, all the way from Mercury to Mars if the market so demands. For years NASA has been encouraging the private sector to step up to the space-commercialization plate. We have, and we intend to hit home runs. Any country, consortium or sufficiently wealthy individual in the world can now afford to buy their own deep-space mission. The idea of focused, inexpensive deep-space missions as a commercial product is as revolutionary today as personal computers were only twenty years ago."

Near Earth Asteroid Opportunities

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