The manifest of payloads aboard the Firefly Blue Ghost lunar lander includes three innovations that were advanced by NASA’s Flight Opportunities program. Flight testing aboard sounding rockets, high-altitude balloons, and rocket-powered landers helped research teams mature the technologies’ readiness and minimize the risk for future endeavors, such as this CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) mission.

Controlled Dynamics Inc. (CDI) created a vibration isolation platform (VIP) to protect orbiting experiments from vibrations caused by their host spacecraft, other payloads, crew movements, or even their own equipment. Tests with Flight Opportunities in 2013 helped CDI’s technology earn a slot on the International Space Station in 2016. These flights were followed by a rapid series of tests aboard Blue Origin, UP Aerospace, and Virgin Galactic vehicles, allowing CDI to “fly-fix-fly” and make key advancements. The CDI platform went on to become one of the technologies that aided the extremely precise pointing required for the laser aboard NASA’s Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) technology demonstration, which launched on October 13, 2023, to successfully reach Earth from millions of miles away.

NASA’s successful effort to collect a sample from an asteroid and return it to Earth — known as the OSIRIS-REx mission — is a testament to the importance of suborbital flight testing. The OSIRIS-REx researchers matured their regolith sampling system in 2012 during parabolic flight testing provided through the Flight Opportunities program. During these flights, they evaluated their design and determined how much simulated asteroid rocks and dust the system could capture in reduced gravity.

NASA’s NDL uses a laser to measure a spacecraft’s velocity and altitude during descent and landing, providing a lighter and more accurate option than radar-based systems for precision navigation and tightly controlled landing on the Moon or other destinations in solar system. Developed at NASA’s Langley Research Center, NDL was tested on a commercial rocket-powered lander in 2017 via Flight Opportunities. In January 2020, NASA selected the NDL technology as a payload on two future Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) missions. The first, Intuitive Machines IM-1 mission, touched down on February 22, 2024, and was the nation’s first Moon landing in 50+ years. These CLPS flights demonstrated the NDL technology for a wide range of landing missions including crewed lunar missions.

Developed at NASA’s Glenn Research Center, the RFMG propellant-quantity gauging technique accurately determines the amount of cryogenic propellant in a tank while in low gravity or under maneuver conditions where sloshing is an issue. Thanks in part to testing with Flight Opportunities, the technology was transferred to Intuitive Machines for integration on the company’s CLPS lander vehicle. During the 2024 IM-1 mission to the Moon, RFMG helped Intuitive Machines verify the propellant levels in the lander.

Designed for creating fluidic optical components to enable larger scale space telescopes and created by researchers from NASA’s Ames Research Center and Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, the FLUTE technology leverages the natural surface tension of liquids to form optical components of various geometries. Only possible in microgravity, this approach could advance space-based astronomy by deploying large fluidic components in place of lenses and mirrors fabricated on and launched from Earth, significantly reducing cost, construction time, and failure risk.
 
Through a variety of tests, including aboard parabolic flights through the support of Flight Opportunities, the FLUTE research team successfully created high-quality, smooth optical components with less time and cost than traditional manufacturing methods. In addition to a 2022 space station demonstration, FLUTE was selected for 2023 Phase I and 2024 Phase II NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) awards.

NASA’s TROPICS (Time-Resolved Observations of Precipitation) mission launched in May 2023 with four CubeSats to gather data to understand the evolution of tropical cyclone intensity. The TROPICS CubeSats incorporate a technology that was tested in its early stages on Flight Opportunities–supported parabolic flights in 2014
 
Referred to as a dual-spinning CubeSat bus, the MIT-developed technology enabled the use of microwave radiometers – previously used only on large satellites – on CubeSats about the size of a two-liter bottle. The Flight Opportunities testing was the first effort to demonstrate the CubeSat-sized spinning mechanisms in a microgravity environment. Now this capability is enabling TROPICS to demonstrate that Earth science data can be obtained with improved resolution, greater flexibility and reliability, and extremely low-cost launches.

Two technologies tested on parabolic flights — Space Fibers 3 from FOMS, Inc. and the Orbital Fiber Optic Production Module (ORFOM) from Mercury Systems — aim to enable automated, on-demand manufacturing of optical fibers in space. Both systems leverage NASA suborbital research that demonstrated superior fiber with significant performance improvements in ZBLAN optical fibers (short for zirconium barium lanthanum aluminum sodium fluoride) when manufactured in zero gravity compared to fibers produced in ground-based labs.
 
On July 16, 2022, both technologies transitioned to the International Space Station through NASA’s In Space Production Applications (InSPA) project to assess results and inform future hardware improvements and steps toward potential optical fiber manufacturing in space in the coming years.

Carthage College’s MPG is a non-invasive, inexpensive, robust method designed to gauge settled and unsettled liquid propellant at resolutions of 1% for settled propellants and 2–4% for unsettled, sloshing propellants. The method was designed to address Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion spacecraft architecture needs, which required in-space gauging accuracy of 1% for remaining propellant mass and leak detection.
 
After multiple suborbital flight tests supported by Flight Opportunities, Carthage College had commercial successes for MPG with Airbus (a one-year study in its zero-emission commercial passenger jet program), Seattle-based GeoJump, partnering with Spaceflight Inc. on its rideshare development, and NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) contractor Intuitive Machines on its Nova-C lunar lander.

NASA’s Lander Vision System (LVS) is based on a terrain-relative navigation (TRN) and hazard avoidance system that photographs the surface beneath a descending spacecraft and matches it with onboard maps to determine vehicle location while also looking for unmapped hazards. Thanks in part to Flight Opportunities–supported testing, the technology was infused into NASA’s Mars 2020 mission and played a critical role in the successful landing of the Perseverance rover on February 18, 2021. The LVS was used to guide the rover to a safe landing site at Jezero Crater – a scientifically interesting but geographically challenging stretch of terrain on the Red Planet.

A 3D printing project from Redwire Space is helping to advance practices for in-situ resource utilization for additive manufacturing of parts, tools, and structures on the lunar surface. Astronauts will use the station’s Made In Space Additive Manufacturing Facility (made possible in part through testing with Flight Opportunities) to demonstrate the Redwire Regolith Print (RRP) 3D printing suite as well as use of a regolith simulant as the feedstock. (Redwire acquired Made In Space in 2020.)

The ring-sheared drop (RSD) experiment from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center aims to help researchers understand the formation of potentially destructive protein clusters and their role in neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. Work on the ISS will pick up from a previous version of the experiment that encountered operational challenges. The research team leveraged parabolic flights supported by Flight Opportunities, which were instrumental to returning the experiment to the station with high confidence of success.