In a second attempt, Jeff Bezos and his rocket company won a contract to bring NASA astronauts to the moon.
NASA announced Friday that it has struck a deal with Bezos’ company, Blue Origin, to provide a lunar lander for a lunar exploration currently scheduled for launch in 2029.
The mission, Artemis V, is another key part of NASA’s Artemis program, which will send astronauts back to the moon as part of an effort to explore the Antarctic region. Astronauts will land on the moon in vehicles built by SpaceX for the Artemis III and IV missions.
“We want more competition,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said Friday at an event at NASA headquarters in Washington. “It’s reliable. We have backups.”
NASA will pay Blue Origin $3.4 billion, but Blue Origin officials said the company contributed more to the development than that amount.
The deal acquisition could start a promising recovery year for Blue Origin after a number of delays and setbacks. That includes the failure of one of the space-going, but not orbiting, New Shepard spacecraft last September during a launch that carried experiments but no passengers. Blue Origin hopes to identify the cause and resume New Shepard flights, including both space tourists and science cargo, later this year.
And some Blue Origin-manufactured hardware could finally be used in orbital missions in the coming months. The company built the engines for the Vulcan rocket booster stage under development by the United Launch Alliance, a joint venture between aerospace giants Boeing and Lockheed Martin.
Blue Origin may also give the public a glimpse of its much larger New Glenn rocket, which it plans to launch payloads into orbit.
For the lunar lander contract, Blue Origin is working with other aerospace companies, including Boeing and Lockheed Martin, to deploy a second team led by Huntsville, Alabama-based defense firm Dynetics. broke. Dynetics, Inc. is a subsidiary of Reidos located in Reston, Virginia. The bid enlisted aerospace contractor Northrop Grumman.
Blue Origin and Dynetics disappointed in 2021 when NASA awarded SpaceX a $2.9 billion contract to build a variant of the giant spacecraft that will land astronauts on the moon for the first time in over half a century. became a loser.
Both companies protested the decision, especially since NASA officials were originally aiming to secure two contracts.
It would have been a successful parallel to NASA’s efforts to outsource cargo and crew transportation to the International Space Station to a private company. Officials say the competition will cut costs and provide redundancy in case something goes wrong.
But NASA officials said giving SpaceX just one award wouldn’t give it enough money for a second lander. SpaceX’s $2.9 billion bid was the lowest ever. The design proposed by Blue Origin cost him $6 billion, and the design proposed by Dynetics was even more expensive.
The Federal Office of Accounting Responsibility rejected both companies’ protests. Blue Origin then sued in federal court, but lost again.
Last year, NASA announced a second lunar lander race after winning a larger budget from Congress. Dynetics and Blue Origin have decided to compete again, albeit with a minor turnover of companies participating in the effort. Northrop Grumman, who was included in Blue Origin’s original proposal, switched to the Dynetics team.
Blue Origin has joined the Boeing team. Astrobotic is a small Pittsburgh company developing a robotic lunar lander. and Honeybee Robotics, a space technology company that Blue Origin acquired last year.
The Blue Origin lander is designed to take two astronauts to the South Pole region of the Moon, but it will take some time to reach the Moon.
SpaceX’s original $2.9 billion deal was to provide the lander for the first lunar landing on Artemis III, currently scheduled for late 2025 but likely to be delayed beyond 2026. . In November, NASA exercised a $1.15 billion option included in its contract with SpaceX to also provide a lander for Artemis IV, a mission scheduled for 2028.
