Blue Origin, the space company founded by Jeff Bezos, will join NASA's lunar lander program.
Blue Origin has been fighting for a role in the Artemis lunar lander contracts - called Human Landing System - for years. After SpaceX was awarded its 2021 contract, Blue Origin
NASA said from the beginning that it hoped to have more than one company working to develop lunar landers capable of carrying humans. But after awarding a single-source contract to SpaceX, the space agency repeatedly cited costs as the reason. Congress allotted NASABut NASA received a small increase for the Human Landing System inStill, NASA awarded SpaceX another contract option ingiving the company a pathway to also provide the lunar lander for the Artemis IV mission, slated for 2027.
While SpaceX plans to use Starship, a gargantuan rocket and spacecraft system designed to function on its own, Blue Origin had a more straightforward plan to develop a- similar to those used for the Apollo missions. Blue Origin's lunar lander would ride as a payload on a separate rocket, while SpaceX's Starship is its own self-contained system.
For Artemis III, Starship would launch to the moon empty. It would rendezvous with NASA's Orion crew capsule, which aims to carry astronauts to lunar orbit. After the astronauts transfer vehicles, Starship would handle the work of touching down on the moon's surface, allowing astronauts to explore and then returning them to Orion in lunar orbit.
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