Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos in 2019.
MARK RALSTON/AFP through Getty Pictures
A staff led by Jeff Bezos’ house firm Blue Origin gained a coveted NASA contract to construct a spacecraft to ship astronauts to and from the moon’s floor, NASA’s chief introduced on Friday, capping a high-stakes contest.
NASA’s determination will give the company a second trip to the moon beneath its Artemis program, after it awarded Elon Musk’s SpaceX $3 billion in 2021 to land astronauts on the moon for the primary time for the reason that last Apollo mission in 1972.
These preliminary missions utilizing SpaceX’s Starship system are slated for later this decade.
The contract Blue Origin contract is valued roughly $3.4 billion, NASA’s exploration chief Jim Free stated, with Blue Origin privately contributing “effectively north” of that quantity, Blue Origin’s lunar lander head John Couluris stated.
Blue Origin has stated little about its newest moon lander proposal past naming its company companions, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, spacecraft software program agency Draper, and robotics agency Astrobotic.
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