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NASA has selected three private space companies to lead the development of lunar landers for their upcoming moon landings.
The three companies are Blue Origin, owned by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos; Elon Musk’s SpaceX; and Dynetics, based in Huntsville, Alabama, announced NASA on Thursday.
Lunar landers will carry astronauts from lunar orbit to the surface of the Moon and vice versa. The Blue Origin contract is worth $ 579 million, SpaceX $ 135 million, and Dynetics will receive $ 253 million.
These awards will cover the next 10 months as each team works with NASA to determine how the proposed solution would work in practice. In the past, NASA specified exactly how it wants the spacecraft to be built. Now, however, he is working more collaboratively with smaller aerospace companies that have developed newer, more cost-effective ways to build space hardware.
“These are three companies that we believe have many capabilities that will allow us to get to the moon,” said NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine.
The three companies are now competing with each other to see who can develop their proposals into feasible landers. Each has taken a slightly different approach.
Blue Origin proposes a three-stage lander that would abandon its landers on the moon’s surface to lighten the load when it’s time to return to Earth. SpaceX wants to use its general-purpose “Starship” spacecraft, which it says could also be used for missions to Mars. Dynetics plans an innovative lander that could be launched on any rocket.
“We have selected the best ideas in the industry to partner with NASA,” said Doug Loverro, associate administrator for the direction of NASA’s human operations and exploration mission. “This is really the last piece of the puzzle to move on and get us back to the moon. We already have all the other pieces at work, and this is the last great piece. We are ready to move forward on this. ”
The landings will be the first time that astronauts have walked on the moon since the Apollo moon landings in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
NASA’s current program is known as Artemis, in honor of Apollo’s twin sister and the goddess of the moon in Greek mythology. Their goal is to land the first woman and the next man on the moon by 2024.
This is four years earlier than NASA’s original plan, which required the construction of a lunar space station called the gateway. Astronauts would dock there first, before moving to a lander and “rolling” to the surface.
In what is considered a politically motivated directive to coincide the landing with the end of Donald Trump’s alleged second term at the White House, Vice President Mike Pence ordered NASA in March 2019 to accelerate its efforts by four years. .
To meet this express schedule, NASA said at today’s conference that it was likely that it would bypass the moon gate entirely for the first landing. This accelerated approach would evolve towards the 2028 sustainable lunar program that it has been planning with international partners such as the European one. Space Agency and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency.
Also during the press conference, Bridenstine said he had spoken to politicians on both sides of the aisle and that he received broad bipartisan support for the lunar effort. But Congress must approve NASA’s budget, which will have to increase by $ 3 billion in 2021 to support the development of the lunar lander. NASA’s 2020 budget is $ 22.6 billion.
At least one other company, aerospace giant Boeing, had submitted a proposal. NASA did not grant him anything and declined to comment on the reasons for Boeing’s exclusion at the press conference. In December, Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft, designed to take NASA astronauts to the International Space Station, had to abort a test flight.
