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According to Rob Chambers, director of Human Resources Development Strategy and Business Development, the goal is to determine the level of interest and to get an idea of what could be the market. Perhaps more importantly, the study will help him to determine the cost of sending a payload beyond low Earth orbit. "One of the reasons we collect this information, and for which NASA has really supported us, is to determine the market price and its usefulness to people," he said in a statement. NASA needs to know how much to charge, say, conduct an experiment on the dark side of the moon before you can take advantage of it, after all.
According to Chambers, Orion will likely be able to start piloting commercial payloads during the Mission 2 Exploration in 2022 or 2023. This is the first-ever inhabited mission of the Orion-SLS system, which is expected to bring the astronauts on a journey of several days the moon in a lunar flyover. Orion could support small payloads as early as mid-2020, but when Exploration Mission 1 should take off. Before this happens, Lockheed plans to sit down with NASA next summer to determine which submissions are achievable and likely to become a reality.
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