CLPS Risks and Benefits Video Final for Social Media

Producers: Jessica Wilde, Scott Bednar Editor: Jessica Wilde

What is said in the film

Landing on the Moon is hard. We're going back. Under this Artemis program, we're going to be sending humans to the Moon for the first time since Apollo. So ahead of humans, we want to get up as much science, exploration and technology experiments as possible. So CLPS starts facilitating a lot of the early science, the things we want to learn before we even send humans.

CLPS stands for Commercial Lunar Payload Services, C-L-P-S. The “services” part is the key element. Ordinarily, when NASA delivers a payload to the surface of the Moon, they do it with a commercial partner, but NASA controls the building of the vehicle. Now, we're buying the service of delivery of our lunar payloads to the surface of the Moon. It is a delivery service akin to a delivery service that you’d have here on Earth.

NASA will provide payloads to a commercial company. They decide how to get it to the Moon. They have to develop their own lander, but they also have to manage the entire end-to-end mission. It's meant to provide affordable, rapid, frequent access to the lunar surface through American companies. We're funding different companies.

We have commercial companies that are competing to win task orders to deliver our payloads to the surface of the Moon. One of the goals when we started CLPS was to help establish a lunar economy. Somebody has to do it first and then it becomes commercially available. Then they're able to crank them out. Then they're able to make it more affordable.

And so the lunar surface is just the next frontier for a commercial environment. But we had to acknowledge up front all the way through the highest levels of the agency leadership that some of them will fail. These missions may not be as successful as a traditional NASA mission. We have accepted the risk that going through this innovative approach with these commercial companies, that there could be some failures. Some of them are new companies.

None of them have ever successfully landed on the surface of the Moon. So they're going to learn lessons. We need to give our vendors the opportunity to learn. And so that’ll help ultimately buy down our risk as these companies learn — okay, what does it take to actually build up the lunar lander, integrate payloads, get to the lunar surface and land safely? They've been able to demonstrate that they have very, very good technical depth and the ability to design and execute missions.

We're willing to take more shots on goal. We aren't risking human lives. And in the big picture, if we're flying missions at 1/10th of the cost of a NASA mission and we fail two of them, we still get eight missions for that same price. Even with one or two or three failures, this is still a very economical proposition. It's a risk posture which is more risk tolerant than NASA's accustomed to.

There's not a single one of these companies that's willing to bet their mission on a coin toss. Every one of them is doing what they can in order to have the most successful mission possible. But the important thing to realize is that risk tolerant does not mean risky, and the rewards are our long-term ability to get payloads to the Moon inexpensively, frequently and rapidly. We want science. So we can then put more of our resources on even more science, exploration and technology payloads and get more of return on investment when we get to the Moon.

CLPS provides tremendous benefit across the scientific and economic communities. So there's a lot we'd like to learn about the Moon to help human habitation and prepare us for missions to Mars and beyond. So the Moon is the first step. NASA.

Where this page came from

This page was imported from [NASA](https://images.nasa.gov/details/CLPS Risks and Benefits Video Final for Social Media). NASA material is generally not copyrighted and is in the public domain.

Nobody has written it yet — it is the source material at a new address, which is why search engines are asked to skip it and why no one earns from it. It is up for grabs: take it on, and it is yours to rewrite and to earn from.