The space agency on Thursday (March 19) released a draft request for proposal (DRFP) for the \u201cNASA Flown Space Vehicle Multimodal Transportation Multiple Award Contract,\u201d seeking to learn how contractors would approach transporting both \u201clarge aerospace vehicles and smaller spacecraft capsules.\u201d<\/p>\n
The pre-solicitation request is an effort to meet the letter of the law \u2014 specifically the One Big Beautiful Bill Act \u2014 that requires NASA relocate a vehicle that flew with humans through space to a non-profit display facility within the vicinity of an agency center with ties to the commercial crew program. Texas Senators John Cornyn and Ted Cruz had intended their legislation to result in Discovery<\/em> being exhibited at Space Center Houston, but Senate rules required the wording to be more vague.<\/p>\n \u201cMy law authorizing and funding the space shuttle Discovery\u2019<\/em>s movement to Houston is being set into motion thanks to NASA\u2019s announcement, and I applaud Administrator Isaacman for keeping this process moving,\u201d said Sen. Cornyn in a statement issued on Friday.<\/p>\n The law as enacted, though, opened the possibility for an alternate artifact to be delivered to \u201cSpace City,\u201d as NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman acknowledged in December 2025.<\/p>\n ,<\/p>\n \u201cMy job now is to make sure that we can undertake such a transportation [of Discovery<\/em>] within the budget dollars that we have available. And of course, most importantly, ensuring the safety of the vehicle,\u201d said Isaacman in an interview with CNBC. \u201cIf we can\u2019t do that, you know what? We\u2019ve got spacecraft that are going around the moon with Artemis II, III, IV, and V.\u201d<\/p>\n If NASA has a preference as to the two outcomes, the draft RFP does not say. Instead, it sets up both possibilities as \u201cillustrative examples\u201d and requests in-depth replies (no longer than 40 pages) on what it would take to accomplish each, including engineering analyses, transportation planning, preservation measures, specialized rigging systems, infrastructure coordination, regulatory compliance, and \u201ccoordinated multimodal transportation execution.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cOne example addresses the conceptual relocation of a large aerospace vehicle comparable in size and complexity to a space shuttle orbiter or solid rocket booster. The second example addresses the transportation of a smaller spacecraft capsule comparable to an Orion crew module or Mercury capsule,\u201d reads the draft request. \u201cThese examples are intended to represent the range of transportation scenarios that NASA may need to support under this contract vehicle.\u201d<\/p>\n NASA is also seeking cost estimates (though not binding price proposals) to plan and achieve each of the moves within a five-year period.<\/p>\n As noted by \u201cmultimodal\u201d in the title, NASA expects the deliveries to use multiple types of transportation. It leaves those choices up to each respondent, but identifies possibilities to include \u201cairlift, sealift, rail transport, overland heavy haul transport and barge transport,\u201d among other specialized means of conveyance.<\/p>\n ,<\/p>\n Ground support equipment, such as the yellow sling seen here attached to Discovery<\/em>, was needed to lift the space shuttle orbiters for past moves. The hardware no longer exists.<\/p>\n Credit: Whatever the mode of transport, the contractor will be responsible for providing the needed rigging to hoist and cradle the spacecraft during its relocation. NASA is not offering any of its own infrastructure, assuming it still exists (in the case of the space shuttle, the specialized sling used to lift the orbiters was scrapped after the California Science Center took Endeavour<\/em> vertical for its display in 2024).<\/p>\n The contractor also must provide the \u201cartifact preservation and curatorial support\u201d needed to \u201cprotect the physical condition, structural integrity, finish, configuration and historical authenticity\u201d of the spacecraft being moved. As Isaacman had alluded to, \u201cthe flown space hardware and aerospace artifacts transported under this contract [must] be treated not only as high-value cargo, but as irreplaceable national assets requiring preservation-focused handling, documentation and care.\u201d<\/p>\n After NASA first flew to the Moon in the mid-1970s, all of the Apollo command modules were transferred to the Smithsonian, which then worked out their delivery to museums around the country and world. Due to budget constraints, the retirement of the four surviving shuttle orbiters in 2011 was managed by NASA, with the National Air and Space Museum only taking over the title for Discovery<\/em>.<\/p>\n The provision in the \u201cOne Big Beautiful Bill Act\u201d that necessitated NASA undertake the DRFP has the agency looking beyond just satisfying the law.<\/p>\n NASA\u2019s Artemis I Orion spacecraft was transported by truck across the United States back to Kennedy Space Center in 2022.<\/p>\n Credit: \u201cThe government anticipates that if an RFP is issued, the resulting contract would enable NASA to establish a long-term enterprise capability that would be transportation operations ranging from small spacecraft capsules to extremely large aerospace vehicles,\u201d the draft reads.<\/p>\n Even if Cornyn and Cruz do not get their way and Discovery<\/em> stays where it is in northern Virginia, the responses to this request may streamline the transport of future flown Orion capsules and other hardware to museums for years to come.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" NASA has taken a step forward to moving an undetermined spacecraft of a various size on an indefinite date to a yet-to-be-decided location. Or to put it another way: NASA is seeking to learn more about what it would take to remove the space shuttle Discovery from the Smithsonian in Virginia and relocate it to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":43344,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-43343","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43343"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43343"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43343\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/43344"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43343"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43343"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43343"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\u201cIllustrative examples\u201d<\/h2>\n
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\n NASA\/Bill Ingalls<\/p>\n<\/figure>\nSustaining service<\/h2>\n
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\n NASA<\/p>\n<\/figure>\n