Citing a lack of confidence in its contractor’s ability to deliver, NASA has abandoned plans to fly a solar-sail mission in 2015 after investing four years and more than $21 million on the project.
The Sunjammer mission, including the spacecraft and a deployable 1,200-square-meter solar sail, was being developed by L’Garde Inc. of Tustin, California, under a contract awarded in September 2011. The contract is slated to expire this coming December, and NASA has no plans to continue the work, according to an internal memo circulated at NASA headquarters here the week of Oct. 7.
“NASA is working with L’Garde to de-scope the existing contract to close out the documentation and deliver completed work to the Agency by the end of 2014,” the memo reads.
NASA spokesman David Steitz said problems with the program surfaced a year ago. “During the annual review last October NASA identified key integration issues that increased the schedule risk,” he said via email Oct. 7.
Nathan Barnes, president of L’Garde, said in an Oct. 17 phone interview that the company’s final delivery to NASA will be a design for a spacecraft module and solar sail that in theory could propel a small spacecraft by harnessing the energy of photon strikes. L’Garde will turn over its design in a Critical Design Audit scheduled for Nov. 7, he said.
After that, L’Garde will lay off about 16 employees, all of them in Tustin, cutting the company’s head count roughly in half. L’Garde employed some 35 people when the Sunjammer project was in full swing.
The mission had been manifested as a secondary payload aboard a Space Exploration Technologies Corp. Falcon 9 rocket scheduled to launch the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration’s Deep Space Climate Observatory in 2015.
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