The probe has been selected for the Artemis 5 mission, which is due to operate in 2029. The safety of the vehicle will first have to be proven by sending it to land on the Moon without a crew.
“I’m honored to be part of this journey with NASA,” billionaire Jeff Bezos, founder of Blue Origin, wrote on Twitter on Friday.
The contract is valued at $3.4 billion, but John Collores, vice president of lunar transportation at Blue Origin, told a press conference that the company itself would contribute “much more” than that. amount to the development of the vehicle.
The Artemis program is the American return to the moon program, during which missions of increasing difficulty will be carried out.
The program began with the Artemis 1 mission, which sent a spacecraft around the moon last fall without a human crew.
The Artemis 2 mission will send four astronauts around the Moon in the fall of 2024, without landing there. The identity of the pioneers who have been chosen for this mission has finally been revealed, and they are three Americans and one Canadian.
After that, Artemis 3 will be the first mission to land astronauts on the Moon since 1972. It’s officially scheduled for late 2025, but many rule out the mission’s success by that date.
After that, two consecutive missions, Artemis 4 (in 2028) and Artemis 5 (in 2029), will also land on the moon, but they will first pass through a new space station in lunar orbit called “Getawi”, which has no not yet been completed.
Strong competition
In 2021, NASA selected SpaceX to develop the lander for the Artemis 3 mission. The contract value was $2.9 billion, although SpaceX also contributed more than that amount to the effort.
Blue Origin, which also competed for this first contract, filed a complaint against NASA, accusing it of having chosen one company rather than two as it had first implied. But the complaint was dismissed.
In 2022, NASA also selected SpaceX to develop the Artemis 4 lander.
At the same time, the American space agency launched a call for proposals from other companies for the remaining phases of the program.
“We want more competition. We want two lunar landers,” US Space Agency chief Bill Nelson said on Friday, “that means more reliability and a backup alternative.”
The Blue Origin lander, nicknamed Blue Moon, will be 16 meters tall and weigh 45 tonnes when filled with liquid hydrogen and oxygen fuel.
Several companies are involved in the project, including Boeing, Draper, Astrorobotic, Honeybee Robotics and Lockheed Martin.
The latter will be responsible for developing a crucial component. Once in lunar orbit, Blue Moon will need to refuel before it can land and pick up astronauts on the lunar surface.
Lockheed Martin should develop a shuttle that will be responsible for refueling Blue Moon around the moon.
Blue Origin plans to use the New Glenn rocket, which has never been used for a space mission, to launch both the lander and the shuttle.
Eye on Mars
Astronauts will blast off aboard the Orion capsule, which will be propelled to the Moon by NASA’s massive new SLS rocket. Artemis 2.
For Artemis 3, Orion will dock directly with SpaceX’s lunar lander, with two astronauts landing on the moon for about a week (two more will stay on Orion). Once the experiments are complete, the adventurers will return via the lander to Orion, which will bring the four crew members back to Earth.
Then, Orion will be linked to the Gateway space station, and the astronauts will pass through it before boarding SpaceX (Artemis 4) or Blue Origin (Artemis 5).
All of these missions target the south pole of the moon, where there is water in the form of ice.
The SpaceX probe will be a modified version of the Starship spacecraft, which is currently under development in Texas. The vehicle exploded during its first major test in April.
The Artemis program aims to learn to live on the moon, in order to test all the technologies necessary for a more dangerous journey: to Mars.
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