NASA announces that Bezos’s Blue Origin will build moon lander
The contract is a milestone for Bezos’ aerospace company after it lost a previous bid for a moon landing to competitor SpaceX.
The US Federal Space Agency has selected Jeff Bezos’ company Blue Origin to build a spacecraft that will send astronauts to and from the surface of the moon, winning a contract worth about $3.4 billion .
In a press release On Friday, NASA said the company would design, test and develop a “lander” under the Artemis program, the agency’s lunar exploration initiative.
“Today we are pleased to announce that Blue Origin will build a human landing system as NASA’s second supplier to deliver Artemis astronauts to the lunar surface,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in the statement.
“We are in a golden age of human spaceflight, made possible by NASA’s commercial and international partnerships. Together we invest in the infrastructure that paves the way for the first astronauts to land on Mars.”
The contract requires Blue Origin to offer a demonstration of an unmanned mission to the moon, followed by a crewed journey that would take astronauts to the lunar surface, scheduled for 2029.
We selected @BlueOrigin to develop the human landing system for the #Artemis V mission. This deep space transportation component will aid us in our goal of sending astronauts to the surface of the Moon and returning them safely home: https://t.co/KMq5fUn0ll pic.twitter.com/mpfUjWr6OX
— NASA (@NASA) May 19, 2023
The announcement came as a handful of private companies, such as Elon Musk’s Space X and Bezos’ Blue Origin, pushed for a bigger role in space activities and competed for lucrative government contracts.
In April 2021NASA awarded SpaceX a $2.89 billion contract to develop a human landing system that would deliver two astronauts to the surface of the moon under the Artemis program.
Blue Origin had been eliminated from bids on previous contracts and Friday’s announcement marked a major milestone for the company.
Blue Origin will build a 16-meter lander in collaboration with defense contractors Lockheed Martin and Boeing, as well as aerospace software company Draper and robotics company Astrobotic. Those companies lost to SpaceX in their 2021 bid, which Blue Origin unsuccessfully tried to quash in court.
“Honored to be on this journey with @NASA to land astronauts on the moon – this time to stay,” Bezos, the billionaire founder of Amazon.com, said in a post on Twitter following the announcement.