Blue Origin takes NASA astronauts to the moon, two years after awarding the first contract to SpaceX

Weather of Arabia - Two years after awarding the first contract to SpaceX, NASA announced Friday that it had chosen the American space company, Blue Origin, to develop a second lander with the aim of transporting astronauts to the surface of the moon. The safety of the vehicle by sending it to land on the moon without a crew.

"I am honored to be part of this journey with NASA," billionaire Jeff Bezos, founder of Blue Origin, wrote on Twitter Friday. The contract value is $3.4 billion, but John Collores, vice president of lunar transportation at Blue Origin, said at a news conference that the company itself would contribute "much more" to the development of the vehicle.

The Artemis program is the American program to return to the moon, during which missions of increasing difficulty will be conducted

The program began with the Artemis 1 mission, during which a spacecraft was sent around the moon last fall, without a human crew, and 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 were chosen for this mission was finally revealed, and they are three Americans and a Canadian.

After that, Artemis 3 will be the first mission to land astronauts on the moon since 1972. This is officially scheduled for the end of 2025, but many rule out the success of the mission at this date, and two consecutive missions will also land after that, Artemis 4 (in 2028). And Artemis 5 (in 2029), on the moon, but they will first pass through a new space station in orbit around the moon called "Getawi", which has not yet been completed.

In 2021, NASA selected SpaceX to develop the lander for the Artemis 3 mission. The contract value was $2.9 billion, though SpaceX also contributed more than that amount to the effort. Blue Origin, which also competed for this first contract, submitted Complaint against NASA, accusing it of choosing one company, not two, as you first implied. But the complaint was dismissed, and in 2022, NASA also selected SpaceX to develop the Artemis 4 lander.

More competition towards space

At the same time, the US space agency launched a call for bids for other companies for the remaining stages of the program, and the head of the US space agency, Bill Nelson, said Friday, "We want more competition. We want two landing vehicles on the moon," and "This means more reliability and an alternative." Spare".

The Blue Origin lander, dubbed Blue Moon, will be 16 meters high and weigh 45 tons when filled with fuel made from liquid hydrogen and oxygen. Several companies are involved in the project, including Boeing, Draper, Astrorobotic, Honeybee Robotics and Lockheed Martin, and the latter will be responsible for developing a critical component. Once in lunar orbit, Blue Moon will need to refuel before it can land and collect astronauts from the lunar surface.

Lockheed Martin should develop a shuttle that will be responsible for refueling Blue Moon around the moon. Blue Origin also plans to use the New Glenn rocket, which has not been used for space missions before, to launch both the lander and the shuttle.

The astronauts will take off aboard the Orion capsule, which will be propelled to the moon by NASA's new SLS massive rocket. These two components were tested empty during the Artemis 1 mission, and will be tested with a human crew during Artemis 2.

As for Artemis 3, Orion will dock directly with SpaceX's lunar lander, and two astronauts will land on the moon for about a week (two more will remain on Orion). Once the experiments are over, the adventurers will return via lander to Orion, which will return the four crew members to Earth. After that, Orion will be linked to the Gateway space station, and astronauts will pass through it before boarding SpaceX (Artemis 4) or Blue Origin (Artemis 5). All of these missions target the moon's south pole, 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 spacecraft exploded during its first major test in April, and the Artemis program aims to learn to live on the moon, in order to test all the technologies needed for a more dangerous journey: "to Mars."