Four astronauts will travel to Gateway in another spacecraft, NASA’s Orion capsule. The Blue Moon lander is designed to fit within the 23-foot-wide diameter of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket, and will weigh more than 45 metric tons when filled with propellants.įor Artemis V, the lander will first dock at Gateway, a small outpost in orbit around the moon. We have a lot to do before we successfully land and return astronauts.” “The feeling is absolutely fantastic,” Mr. The company built engines for the booster stage of the Vulcan rocket being developed by the United Launch Alliance, a joint venture of the aerospace giants Boeing and Lockheed Martin.īlue Origin might also provide some public glimpses of New Glenn, a much larger rocket that is to launch payloads to orbit.įor the lunar lander contract, Blue Origin, in collaboration with other aerospace companies such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin, beat a second team led by Dynetics, a defense company based in Huntsville, Ala. Blue Origin has identified the cause and hopes to resume New Shepard flights involving both space tourists and scientific cargo later this year.Īnd some hardware manufactured by Blue Origin might finally be used on an orbital mission in the coming months. The winning of the contract could start a promising rebound year for Blue Origin after a number of delays and setbacks - including the failure of one of its New Shepard vehicles, which travel to space but not to orbit, during a launch last September that carried experiments but no passengers.
Lisa Watson-Morgan, the manager for the human landing system program at NASA, said the second lander “also helps us with a more diversified industrial base, and that will help us advance innovation in the future.” ”We want more competition,” Bill Nelson, the administrator of NASA, said during the announcement on Friday at NASA’s headquarters in Washington. In the past, some members of Congress have complained about providing taxpayer money to Blue Origin, given Mr. John Couluris, Blue Origin’s vice president for lunar transportation, said that the company was contributing “well north” of the price of the NASA contract amount to the development effort and that it, not NASA, would absorb any cost overruns. Astronauts are to land on the moon in a vehicle built by SpaceX for the Artemis III and IV missions. The mission, Artemis V, is another critical piece of NASA’s Artemis program to send astronauts back to the moon as part of an effort to explore its south pole region. NASA agreed to pay $3.4 billion for the 50-foot-tall spacecraft, which is named Blue Moon and can transport four astronauts to the moon’s surface. Bezos’ company, Blue Origin, to provide a lunar lander for a moon mission that is scheduled to launch in 2029. NASA announced on Friday that it had awarded a contract to Mr. On their second try, Jeff Bezos and his rocket company have won a contract to take NASA astronauts to the moon.
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