NASA said Friday it is shutting down a
The agency in a statement said it will discontinue the On-orbit Servicing, Assembly and Manufacturing 1 project after nearly a decade of work due to "continued technical, cost, and schedule challenges, and a broader community evolution away from refueling unprepared spacecraft, which has led to a lack of a committed partner."
The program's lead contractor,
OSAM-1 has been in development since 2015 with the goal of assisting the
The spacecraft would have utilized an attached Space Infrastructure Dexterous Robot (SPIDER) to refuel the Landsat, assemble a communications antenna and demonstrate in-space manufacture of a 32-foot carbon fiber composite beam to verify the capability of constructing large spacecraft structures in orbit.
The agency previously expressed hopes that the program would demonstrate its servicing technologies could be used in other NASA missions and even transfer OSAM-1 technologies to commercial entities and jumpstart a new domestic servicing industry projected to be worth
An audit from
"NASA and
The report also noted
OSAM-1's cancellation comes after
NASA said it is reviewing how to mitigate the impact of the project's shuttering on its Goddard center workforce.
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