2023-05-20 05:42:44
Two years after awarding a first contract to SpaceX, NASA announced on Friday that it had chosen the American space company Blue Origin to build a second moon landing system, intended to bring astronauts to the surface of the Moon. Billionaire Jeff Bezos, founder of the company, said he was “honored to be part of this journey with NASA” this Friday on Twitter.
The lander has been selected for the Artemis 5 mission, which is due to take place in 2029. The contract is worth $3.4 billion, but John Couluris, vice president in charge of lunar transport at Blue Origin, has clarified during a press conference that the company would itself contribute “way beyond” this amount to develop the vessel. He will first have to demonstrate his safety by landing on the Moon without a crew.
Astronauts on the Moon by 2025?
The Artemis program is the American return to the Moon program, consisting of missions of increasing difficulty. It started with the Artemis 1 mission, which sent a spacecraft around the Moon last fall, unmanned. The Artemis 2 mission will send four astronauts around the Moon in the fall of 2024, without landing there. Artemis 3 will then be the first mission to land astronauts on the lunar surface since 1972. It is officially scheduled for the end of 2025, a schedule which it is widely believed will not be met.
The next two missions, Artemis 4 and Artemis 5, will also both land on the Moon, but will first pass through a new space station in lunar orbit that does not yet exist.
In 2021, NASA had chosen SpaceX to build the Artemis 3 lander. The contract amounted to 2.9 billion dollars, even if SpaceX also contributes to the effort beyond this amount. Blue Origin, also in competition for this first contract, had filed a complaint against NASA, accusing it of having chosen a single company and not two as it had suggested. But the complaint was dismissed.
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