NASA announced on Friday that it has selected American aerospace company Blue Origin to build a second lunar landing system, intended to carry astronauts to the moon’s surface.
The module has been selected for the Artemis V mission, scheduled for 2029. However, it will first have to prove its safety by landing on the moon without a crew.
“It’s an honor to be part of this journey with NASA to take astronauts to the moon,” billionaire Jeff Bezos, founder of Blue Origin and tech giant Amazon, wrote on Twitter Friday.
Honored to be on this journey @NASA to land astronauts on the moon – this time to stay. Together we solve the evaporation problem and turn LOX-LH2 into a storable propellant combination, bringing the latest state of the art technology to all deep space missions. #Artemis… pic.twitter.com/Y0zDhnp1qX
—Jeff Bezos (@JeffBezos) May 19, 2023
The contract is worth $3.4 billion, but John Couluris, Blue Origin’s vice president of lunar transportation, said at a news conference that the company will contribute much more to the development of the spacecraft.
Artemis is the US Space Agency’s return program to the moon. It consists of several missions with increasing difficulty.
In 2021, NASA selected SpaceX to build the Artemis III lander, which will be the first mission to deliver humans to the lunar surface since 1972. The contract is worth $2.9 billion, though SpaceX will partner with more.
Blue Origin, which was also competing for that first contract, had sued NASA, accusing it of only choosing one company for that mission and not two as it insinuated, a common practice of having a plan B in case of failure. However, the lawsuit was dismissed.
In 2022, SpaceX was also selected by NASA to develop the lander for the Artemis IV mission. At the same time, the agency launched a tender for other companies to participate in the rest of the program.
“We want more competition. We want two landers,” NASA Chief Bill Nelson said Friday. “That way you have more reliability and supportive alternatives.”
The Blue Origin module, called Blue Moon, is being developed with several partner companies: Lockheed Martin, Draper, Boeing, Astrobotic and Honeybee Robotics.
Source: DN
