Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin Lands a Major NASA Moon Landing Project

() — Blue Origin, the space company founded by Jeff Bezos, will join NASA’s moon landing program, competing against Elon Musk’s SpaceX to develop spacecraft to transport astronauts to the surface of the Moon.

NASA announced Friday that Blue Origin will work to prepare its lander concept. bluemoon for a mission dubbed Artemis V, which is scheduled to lift off in 2028. Artemis V would be the third in a series of missions under NASA’s lunar program that are expected to land humans on the Moon.

Blue Origin will develop its lunar lander together with partners Lockheed Martin, Draper, Boeing, Astrobotic and Honeybee Robotics.

In all, the price tag for Blue Origin’s lunar lander development program is likely worth more than $7 billion. The contract is worth about $3.5 billion, according to Jim Free, NASA’s associate administrator for exploration systems development.

And “Blue Origin will contribute more than $3.4 billion as part of this effort,” John Couluris, the company’s vice president of lunar transportation, said during a news conference Friday.

“We want to establish lunar permanence and we want to make sure that we have constant access to the Moon,” added NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. “So with that in mind, Blue Origin itself will contribute more than 50% of the total effort to get to not only this mission, but also to ensure permanence.”

A sea change for lunar lander development

SpaceX received the first moon landing contract — worth $2.9 billion — in April 2021, launching the company to develop a version of its upcoming Starship spacecraft for NASA’s Artemis III mission. It is expected to be released from 2025.

It is unknown if NASA and SpaceX will meet that deadline. The Starship blew up last month after its maiden test launch attempt.

Blue Origin has been fighting for a stake in the Artemis moon landing contracts—called the Human Landing System—for years. After SpaceX won its 2021 contract, Blue Origin sued the US government, saying NASA unfairly favored SpaceX and arguing that the space agency would be better served by funding SpaceX and Blue Origin’s plans to develop vehicles. capable of landing on the Moon.

a judge finally ruled against Blue Originalthough NASA later committed to expanding the number of companies with lunar landing contracts to two.

NASA said early on that it hoped to have more than one company working to develop human-carrying lunar landers. But after awarding a sole-source contract to SpaceX, the space agency repeatedly cited costs as the reason. Congress allocated NASA about $2 billion less than it requested in fiscal year 2021.

But NASA received a small raise for the Human Landing System in fiscal year 2022: $150 million more than it requested for the lunar landing program.

Still, NASA awarded SpaceX another contract option in novembergiving the company a path to also provide the lunar lander for the Artemis IV mission, scheduled for 2027. That deal was valued at about $1.15 billion.

Friday’s announcement marks a sea change for the program, officially adding a second lunar landing provider to compete with SpaceX on missions beyond Artemis V.

Blue Origin Human Landing System Plans

Since the beginning of the Human Landing System program, Blue Origin and SpaceX have given NASA two very different proposals for landing on the Moon.

While SpaceX plans to use Starship, a gigantic rocket and spacecraft system designed to run on its own, Blue Origin had a simpler plan to develop a lunar lander, similar to those used for the Apollo missions. Blue Origin’s lunar lander would travel as payload on a separate rocket, while SpaceX’s Starship is its own autonomous system.

Functionally, however, Blue Moon would take on the same role as SpaceX’s part of Starship.

For Artemis III, the Starship would be launched empty to the Moon. She would meet NASA’s Orion crew capsule, whose goal is to carry astronauts into lunar orbit. After the astronauts transferred the vehicles, Starship would take over the job of landing on the Moon’s surface, allowing the astronauts to explore and then return them to Orion in lunar orbit.

For Artemis IV, the Starship would also dock with the Gateway, a planned space station intended to orbit the moon.

Both companies will be required to complete scouting missions — or test flights — before they can make such landings.