It’s not clear whether NASA and SpaceX will hit that deadline. It’s expected to launch as early as 2025. SpaceX was awarded the first lunar lander contract - worth $2.9 billion - in April 2021, setting up the company to develop a version of its forthcoming Starship spacecraft for NASA’s Artemis III mission. “So with that in mind, Blue Origin itself is contributing over 50% of the total effort to get to not only this mission but to ensure permanence.”Ī sea change for lunar lander development “We want to establish permanence on the moon, and we want to ensure that we have consistent access to the moon,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson added. The contract is worth about $3.5 billion, according to Jim Free, NASA’s associate administrator for exploration systems development.Īnd “Blue Origin is contributing well north of $3.4 billion as part of this effort,” said John Couluris, the company’s vice president for lunar transportation, during a news briefing Friday.
#Spacex lunar lander contract series
Artemis V would be the third in a series of missions under NASA’s lunar program that’s expected to land humans on the moon.īlue Origin will develop its lunar lander alongside partners Lockheed Martin, Draper, Boeing, Astrobotic and Honeybee Robotics.Īltogether, the price tag for Blue Origin’s lunar lander development program is likely worth more than $7 billion. NASA announced Friday that Blue Origin will work to prepare its Blue Moon lander concept for a mission dubbed Artemis V, which is slated to take off as soon as 2028. Blue Origin, the space company founded by Jeff Bezos, will join NASA’s lunar lander program - competing against Elon Musk’s SpaceX to develop spacecraft intended to ferry astronauts to the moon’s surface.
0 kommentar(er)
