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Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin will bring the first woman to the surface of the moon, the billionaire said on Friday as NASA nears a decision to choose its first privately-built lunar landers capable of shipping. astronauts to the moon by 2024.
“This (BE-7) is the engine that will bring the first woman to the surface of the Moon,” Bezos said in an Instagram post with a video of the engine testing this week at the Marshall Space Flight Center. NASA in Huntsville, Alabama. .
The BE-7 engine, which Blue Origin has been developing for years, has counted 1,245 seconds of test-fire time and will power the lunar lander of the company’s National Team Human Landing System.
Blue Origin leads a “national team” as the prime contractor it assembled in 2019 to help build its Blue Moon lander. That team includes Lockheed Martin Corp, Northrop Grumman Corp and Draper.
Blue Origin has competed for lucrative government contracts in recent years and is competing with SpaceX and the Dynetics of billionaire rival Elon Musk, owned by Leidos Holdings Inc, to win a contract to build NASA’s next human lunar landing system to transport humans. to the moon in the next. decade.
In April, NASA awarded a lunar lander development contract to the Blue Origin team worth $ 579 million, as well as two other companies: SpaceX, which received $ 135 million to help develop its Starship system, and Dynetics. , owned by Leidos, which earned $ 253 million.
NASA is set to choose two of the three companies “in early March” 2021 to continue building its lander prototypes for manned missions to the moon starting in 2024, an agency spokeswoman said.
But meager funding for landing systems made available to NASA by Congress, as well as uncertainty about the incoming Biden administration’s views on space exploration, have threatened to delay NASA’s decision to advance the plans. lunar lander contracts.
