It would carry four astronauts, NASA’s Reid Wiseman, Christina Koch and Victor Glover, as well as Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen, in a mission around the moon as a precursor to a landing.īecause Orion isn’t able to land on the moon, the lunar landers would be launched separately and then meet with Orion in lunar orbit. The next flight, Artemis II, is scheduled for late next year. Last year, NASA completed the Artemis I flight, the first launch of its Space Launch System rocket that sent the Orion crew capsule, without anyone aboard, around the moon. SpaceX was not eligible for the contract awarded Friday because NASA wants to ensure that it has two providers to choose from for future missions. In addition to flying crew members, the lander could come in a cargo version that would be capable of delivering as much as 30 metric tons to the lunar surface, he said.Īfter the initial award, SpaceX won another contract for the second crewed landing, Artemis IV, scheduled for 2028. He added that there would also be “a number of test launches and landings that we’ll be releasing here soon.” On Friday, John Couluris, Blue Origin’s lunar lander program manager, said the company would invest “well north of $3.4 billion” of its money into the program.īefore the first human landing, the company would “be landing an exact copy of that lander one year prior.” Court of Federal Claims and lost that, too.Īs a last resort, Bezos wrote an open letter to Nelson offering to sweeten the pot by waiving $2 billion in development costs, an offer that was rebuffed because the contract had already been awarded. Both lost.īlue Origin then filed a lawsuit in the U.S. It also set off legal challenges that roiled the normally staid world of NASA contracting.īlue Origin, whose bid of $6 billion was more than twice that of SpaceX’s, protested to the Government Accountability Office, as did Dynetics. The contract award marked a huge victory for Musk and SpaceX and a triumph over Dynetics and Blue Origin, which at the time had assembled a “national team” for the effort that included Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin and Draper. He has said that watching Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walk on the moon in 1969 was a “seminal moment” for him.īlue Origin appeared to be the favorite for the first Artemis landing contract because it had obtained the most money in a preliminary round.īut in 2021, NASA awarded SpaceX a $2.9 billion contract for the first human landing of the Artemis program, a mission known as Artemis III that is scheduled for 2025 but probably will be delayed. Moon landings have been a priority of Blue Origin and one of Bezos’s lifelong passions. And today’s announcement is about maintaining that cadence.” Speaking at the announcement Friday morning, Nelson said that the space agency has “big goals for our Artemis program, about a mission a year to the lunar surface for stays for astronauts up to 30 days. Speaking at an event on Capitol Hill Thursday while flanked by astronauts, Nelson said that, “the kind of cuts that you have seen talked about would be devastating to NASA, to our programs and what you’re being presented with today – a crew that is taking us back to the moon after half a century.” In recent weeks, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson has warned, however, that if negotiations over federal spending result in budget cuts, as some are proposing, there could be significant disruptions to the moon missions as well as other programs. The Artemis program was started by the Donald Trump administration but has been embraced by President Biden, giving NASA a continuity of purpose that it had lacked in previous decades. Under the Artemis program, NASA intends to eventually sponsor a regular cadence of astronauts to the moon.īut instead of going to the equatorial region of the moon, as was done during the Apollo era of the 1960s and ’70s, it is aiming for the lunar south pole, where there is water in the form of ice in the permanently shadowed craters. The contract, worth $3.4 billion, is for NASA’s planned third human landing on the moon under its Artemis program.Īs of now, the landing using Blue Origin’s spacecraft, a four-legged, 52-foot-tool lander that it calls Blue Moon, would occur in 2029, following two crewed landings by SpaceX. This time, Blue Origin beat Dynetics, a subsidiary of Leidos, the defense contractor. Blue Origin won a coveted NASA contract Friday to develop a spacecraft that would land humans on the surface of the moon, a major victory and redemption for Jeff Bezos’s space venture two years after it lost out on another, similar contract to Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
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