With SpaceX now responsible for flying cargo and astronauts to the International Space Station, NASA is reorganizing to put a new emphasis on deep space, including setting up a new directorate to develop the technologies needed to pursue what would be some of the most ambitious missions NASA has ever attempted, including building a permanent presence on the moon and eventually Mars.

 

In an interview with The Washington Post, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said the new directorate, known as Exploration Systems Development, will oversee the development of new tools, including habitats, rovers and propulsion systems, to help NASA push new frontiers.

 

The success of the agency’s partnership with a growing commercial space industry allows “NASA to get out of low Earth orbit and go explore,” Nelson said.

 

NASA announced the creation of the new directorate at a town hall meeting with agency employees. Jim Free, a former associate NASA administrator, will run the new directorate. Kathy Lueders, who leads the agency’s current Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate, will run a second new directorate, to be known as Space Operations. It will oversee programs once they transition out of development, such as the space station, the commercialization of low Earth orbit, and, in the years to come, operations on the moon, NASA said in a statement.

 

A reorientation of NASA operations has been anticipated, hastened by the success of SpaceX, which has been delivering cargo and supplies to the space station for years. Then last year, SpaceX flew the first mission of NASA astronauts to the space station, demonstrating that NASA no longer was the only player in getting astronauts to low Earth orbit. That reality was cemented last week, when SpaceX, the venture founded by Elon Musk, successfully flew four civilians on a three-day mission orbiting the Earth without any NASA involvement.

 

In addition to SpaceX, Northrop Grumman flies cargo to the station. And Boeing is under contract to fly astronauts there, though it has stumbled badly with the development of its Starliner spacecraft and is years behind schedule.

 

The ability to depend on commercial enterprises for low-Earth undertakings frees NASA to devote more attention to more ambitious missions.

 

“If you look out over the next two decades, what we have is a string of programs,” Pam Melroy, NASA deputy administrator, said in an interview. “We’re talking habitats, transportation systems like rovers. We’re talking infrastructure like power, communications, resource extraction. … The scope of what we have stretching out ahead of us, it’s very different than what we’ve done in the past.”

 

Nelson said the changes were made because the enterprise, from flying astronauts to the space station, to its Artemis program to get astronauts to the moon and then eventually to Mars, “got too big. One person can’t do it all.”

 

Free said that the two directorates will work together but that he will be looking ahead to future missions and harnessing the technology that would make them happen, from new forms of propulsion to in-space manufacturing and mining. But first the agency must be focused on returning humans to the moon under the Artemis program, Free said during the town hall.

 

“That’s our focus, that’s our responsibility,” he said.

 

“There’s so much new technology that has to be developed for the moon and Mars, as well as cultivating the international partnerships that are going to be with us,” Nelson said.