Elon Musk's private rocket company SpaceX was awarded a $178 million launch services contract for NASA's first mission focusing on Jupiter's icy moon Europa and whether it may host conditions suitable for life, the space agency said on Friday.
The Europa Clipper mission is due for blastoff in October 2024 on a Falcon Heavy rocket owned by Musk's company, Space Exploration Technologies Corp, from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, NASA said in a statement posted online.
In April, SpaceX was awarded a $2.9 billion contract to build the lunar lander spacecraft for the planned Artemis program that would carry NASA astronauts back to the moon for the first time since 1972. The company's partly reusable 23-story Falcon Heavy, currently the most powerful operational space launch vehicle in the world, flew its first commercial payload into orbit in 2019.The probe is to conduct a detailed survey of the ice-covered Jovian satellite, which is a bit smaller than Earth's moon and is a leading candidate in the search for life elsewhere in the solar system.
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