Flight Opportunities
Reports and Fact Sheets
Accomplishments Reports
Fact Sheets and Posters
Guide to Commercial Suborbital Flight Providers for Flight Opportunities
Testing and maturing space technologies with commercial providers
Leveraging Commercial Flight Testing to Advance Lunar Surface Technologies
This Flight Opportunities poster was presented at the 2023 Lunar Surface Innovation Consortium. The poster provides an overview of the program, technologies and research appropriate for flight testing, mechanisms for getting involved, available flight vehicles, and examples of lunar technology testing.
News and Industry Articles
A Decade of Space Technology Maturation through NASA’s Flight Opportunities Program
By John W. Kelly, Edmund Hamlin, Danielle McCulloch, Lucas Moxey, Robert W. Seibold, Geyne Crispi, Stephan Ord, and Alexander van Dijk
Presented during the “Partnering to Sustain a Healthy Space Economy” session at the ASCEND 2020 virtual event, November 16-18, 2020.
Read the paper about A Decade of Space Technology Maturation through NASA’s Flight Opportunities Program
How Apollo Landed on the Moon
A colloquium presentation by Dr. Dean Eppler; September 14, 2022
›› Download: Dean Eppler Slides: Apollo Lunar Landing Experience
See the time codes below to jump to specific sections of Dr. Eppler’s presentation:
- Introduction by Laurie Grindle and introductory remarks by Dr. Eppler and recommended reading (0:00:00)
- Basic terminology and acronyms (0:06:53)
- Note: Written definitions appear at 0:07:46
- Basic approach for landing on the Moon (0:08:05)
- Key lunar module systems (0:09:48)
- Challenges of the Moon’s surface (0:11:38)
- About aborts/abort modes (0:27:37)
- Constraints for landing site selection (0:30:35)
- How we did the landing (0:32:28)
- Why We Did It This Way: A recap of lunar descent and landing (0:49:12)
- Audio of Apollo 17 approach and landing (0:52:16)
- Conclusions and recommendations: (1:05:09)
- The need for pilots
- Lander design
- Astronaut aviation experience
- Training
- Information technology (IT) design
- Navigation
- Lighting constraints
- Q&A (1:11:55)
