Solar Probe Plus, a flagship heliophysics mission NASA expects to cost some $1.5 billion to build and launch around July 2018, needs a bigger rocket than United Launch Alliance’s Atlas 5, according to a senior official at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, where the solar observatory is being built.
“The plan we had was to go on an Atlas 5, but the problem is that required us to develop a new, high-performance custom upper stage, and that represented a fairly significant risk for the project,” Michael Ryschkewitsch, head of APL’s Space Sector, said in a July 22 interview here. “Our team made the case to NASA headquarters that the overall risk to the mission would be lowered if we went to a heavy class launch vehicle. The obvious players right now are Delta 4 Heavy and Falcon Heavy.”
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Although Falcon Heavy has yet to fly, NASA’s Launch Services Program left the door open for SpaceX to compete for Solar Probe Plus launch services in a draft request for proposals released July 10. While NASA will consider only rockets certified to loft Category 3 payloads — the internal designation reserved for the most important and risk-averse missions — agency rules allow for Category 3 certification with as few as three launches, NASA spokesman Joshua Buck wrote in a July 24 email.
SpaceX has three Falcon Heavy launches on its manifest between now and 2017: an inaugural demonstration launch planned for 2015 followed in short order by the shared launch of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Deep Space Climate Observatory and the U.S. Air Force’s Space Test Program-2 experimental spacecraft, and a 2017 launch of a commercial communications satellite for Intelsat of Washington and Luxembourg. SpaceX spokesman John Taylor declined to comment about whether SpaceX would seek certification to launch Solar Probe Plus.
